Hi Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Manchester, UK, for an appearance at the Manchester JUG and then it's off to London, UK, for some customer visits and the epic Devoxx UK event. This time next week I'll be in Denver, USA, for the SpringOne Tour event. If you're in any of these places, as usual, don't hesitate to reach out and say hi (@starbuxman)

• Missed an installment of This Week in Spring? Well, have no fear there's now a monthly aggregation of the weekly aggregation! Here's the April edition
• Dormain Drewitz swoops in for the kill with this epic announcement: Pivotal and Confluent are teaming up to make Pivotal's Kubernetes environment, PKS, the best place to run Confluent Kafka
• Spring Framework luminary Stéphane Nicoll just announced Spring Framework .3.17 and 5.0.6
• Spring Data legend Mark Paluch just announced the release of Spring Data Ingalls SR12 and Kay SR7. These releases are, as usual, packed with new releases!
• Spring Batch and Spring Cloud Task lead Michael Minella has just announced Spring Cloud Task 2.0.0.RELEASE. The new release updates dependencies, supports restricts concurrent task execution, and refined behavior when a failed batch job execution fails a task.
• The Pivotal blog looks at state management with Spring Session.
• In last week's Spring Tips, I looked at using the new metrics collection facade Micrometer in the Actuator in Spring Boot 2. Check it out!
• BOSH is an abstraction layer that lets you describe immutable infrastructure in a IaaS-agnostic way. There are BOSH providers for AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenStack, VSphere, and a zillion other service providers. Cloud Foundry, which is optimized for the management of applications, builds on top of BOSH. This allows for its unparalleled portability. Now, there is a Kubernetes BOSH CPI. This is very promising!
• The New Stack looks at T-Mobile's ushering in of 5G with Tibco and CloudFoundry
• Check out senior Spring fan Matt Raible's "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Testing Spring Boot APIs and Angular Components with WireMock, Jest, Protractor, and Travis CI" over on the Okta blog.
• Pivotal Principal Technologist Jim Weaver looks at reactive programming with this amazing demo.
• I love this post! It's got nothing to do with Spring, but you'll probably want to read it if you're an aspiring cloud-native. It's a post from folks at Pivotal on the soft touch reconfigurations that they made to the use of public cloud IaaS resources to save as much as $675,000 per year.
• https://twitter.com/springframework/status/993844928915623936
• The Swisscom blog looks at the power of buildpacks. Buildpacks stage an environment for a particular type of application workload that then gets turned into a container that then is run on a platform like Heroku or Cloud Foundry
• The Baeldung has a nice post that looks at the Assert class in Spring Framework. Short and sweet!
• This E4Developer blog looks into Spring Data and its various applications in the world of microservices.
• This isn't related to Spring, per se, but it's interesting; it's a post on the jOOQ blog that looks at the different ways to reflectively access default methods on interfaces in Java 8, 9 and 10.
• Community comrade Michael Simons does a nice job introducing reactive Spring in this German language post
• Pivotal Principal Technologist Mario Gray looks at websockets, complete with a Spring-based demo. This is well worth a read and bookmark!
• Pivotal Principal technologist Jakub Pilimon has put together a nice post on testing distributed message-driven applications with Spring. It iterates, starting from the lowest level primitives in Spring's messaging support and then moving to Spring Cloud Contract. This is an awesome post - read it!
• Community patron Nicolas Frankel has a nice post on checking the quality of Kotlin code with Detekt and SonarQube. If you're a Spring devloper writing your code in Kotlin, you might like this.
• Speaking of testing messaging code, Clinton Magro put together Spring Boot autoconfiguration and starter that lets you embed the Qpid AMQP-compatible broker for, among other things, ease of testing
• twitter.com
• Piotr Szybicki looks at performance testing Angular and Spring applications secured with Keycloak using Gatlin. This is the first of two worth-a-read posts.
• The Java Mission Control application - your one-stop-shop for debugging and diagnostics of Java applications that has historically shipped in Oracle's JDK - is now open source! Hurray!
• Spring Data's Christoph Strobl teased some of the new transaction support in Spring Data MongoDB
• Last week Pivotal and Confluent announced a partnership to bring Kafka to Pivotal's Kubernetes environment and I hope you'll forgive my indulgent reminder that you'll probably love this oldie-but-a-goodie Spring Tips video on Spring Cloud Stream and Kafka Streams
• Microservices thought leader (I'm not being ironic!) Daniel Bryant has put together a table that looks at the steps to cloud-native for both developers and platforms
• Rajagopal ParthaSarathi looks at parallel processing with Spring Batch
• This is pretty cool - the Oracle Devs blog has a nice post on distributed tracing infrastructure with OpenZipkin, Apache Kafka, and Apache Cassandra. It even uses Spring!