On behalf of the team, I am pleased to announce that the first release candidate for the Spring Cloud Brixton Release Train is out. The milestone is available today and can be found in our Spring Milestone repository.

Highlights

Some of the highlights of the Brixton Release Train are:

• Spring Boot 1.3.x and Spring 4.2.x support
• Cluster Leadership election and locks via Spring Cloud Cluster
• Hashicorp Consul support for service registration/discovery & configuration via Spring Cloud Consul
• Apache Zookeeper support for service registration/discovery, configuration via Spring Cloud Zookeeper and leader election in Spring Cloud Cluster
• Distributed tracing through the Spring Cloud Sleuth abstraction with two out of the box implementations: one supporting logging (ideal for log collectors and multiplexers like Logstash and Loggregator) and one supporting Twitter’s Zipkin
• Netflix Atlas Telemetry System and the next generation Spectator Metrics library are available in Spring Cloud Netflix
• Spring Cloud Bus is now powered by the recently released Spring Cloud Stream

The following modules are part of Brixton.RC1:

We are looking forward to a Brixton.RELEASE towards the beginning of April.

And, as always, we welcome feedback: either in GitHub, on Stack Overflow, or on Twitter.

Notes:

A @LoadBalanced RestTemplate is no longer created by default. See the updated documentation for details. You need to create it in your applications configuration. For example:

@Configuration
public class MyConfiguration {

    @LoadBalanced
    @Bean
    RestTemplate restTemplate() {
        return new RestTemplate();
    }
}

Please note the correct BOM to use is spring-cloud-dependencies not spring-cloud-starter-parent (see Getting Started below).

Getting Started

The easiest way to get started with Brixton.RC1 is to head to http://start.spring.io. If you want to write your build file by hand with Maven with a BOM (dependency management only):

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>spring-milestones</id>
        <name>Spring Milestones</name>
        <url>http://repo.spring.io/milestone</url>
        <snapshots>
            <enabled>false</enabled>
        </snapshots>
    </repository>
</repositories>
<dependencyManagement>
  <dependencies>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-dependencies</artifactId>
    <version>Brixton.RC1</version>
    <type>pom</type>
    <scope>import</scope>
  </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>
<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-config</artifactId>
  </dependency>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-eureka</artifactId>
  </dependency>
  ...
</dependencies>

or with Gradle:

buildscript {
  dependencies {
    classpath "io.spring.gradle:dependency-management-plugin:0.5.6.RELEASE"
  }
}
repositories {
    maven {
        url 'http://repo.spring.io/milestone'
    }
}
apply plugin: "io.spring.dependency-management"

dependencyManagement {
  imports {
    mavenBom 'org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-dependencies:Brixton.RC1'
  }
}

dependencies {
    compile 'org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-starter-config'
    compile 'org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-starter-eureka'
    ...
}

If you happen to be in Barcelona mid-May, don’t miss the chance to join the Spring I/O conference where there will be various presentations on Spring Cloud. Also, the registration for SpringOne Platform (early August, Las Vegas) has opened recently, in case you want to benefit from early bird ticket pricing. The latter is also still open for talk proposals (but only until March 24, so hurry up!). So if you’re interested to give a talk about Spring or Pivotal-related technologies, feel free to submit!