Hi, Spring fans! Happy New Year to you! Here’s hoping that your new year is healthier and happier than the last. 

Also, this is the eighth anniversary of This Week in Spring, I started this series in the first week of January 2011. We’ve come a long way since then! This is as good a time as any to remind you that I love this community and I love reading what you’re up to. It’s a pleasure to learn right along with you. As always, I’m grateful for any contributions in this humble roundup; just hit me up on Twitter. My Direct Messages are wide-open. Thank you for everything you’ve done to drive this and for everything I know you will do, dear reader.

Now then, I’m technically on vacation so I’m going to make this a short-and-sweet installment. So, without further ado, let’s get to it.

• In last week’s Spring Tips, I looked at the Spring Boot-based stack powering one of the world’s largest e-commerce engines, Alibaba. This video’s piqued a lot of people’s curiosity, so check it out!
• Last week’s installment of This Week in Spring was our annual roundup, This Year in Spring, which I invite you to check out.
• Check out this podcast where Pivotal SVP James Watters talks about his thesis for enterprise Kubernetes
• The future of Kubernetes is Virtual Machines (not Containers)
• May I humbly recommend this Oracle Magazine piece on writing reactive Spring applications that I wrote a while back? It’s an oldie-but-a-goodie.
• This is an interesting StackOverflow thread on what the differences between Spring Data JPA and Hibernate are. If I’m honest, I didn’t realize anyone was confused about this. Read this for insight on that point and more.
• This is an interesting piece on dynamic pagination with QueryDSL and Spring Data.
• Doing things with large heaps? You might want to investigate the ZGC.
• I liked this Reddit thread wherein people talk about their use cases for Spring in their organizations.
• Nice post on the Ippon Tech blog on improving the performance of your Spring Data JPA application —another oldie-but-a-goodie.