Hi, Spring fans! It’s been quite a crazy week! I was in Spring I/O last week in Barcelona, Spain, and there was a deluge of interesting news to come out of the show! I loved the show — a sort of mini SpringOne — and am chomping at the bit to see what comes next. I’m now beginning a small tour starting in Zurich, Switzerland; then, I’m off to Paris, France, for the epic SpringOne Tour event there. Next, I’m off to Minsk, Belarus; then, I'm off again to Barcelona, Spain, for JBCN. And then, finally, I'm home for the middle school graduation of my kid at the end of the month. So much exciting stuff culminating in an even more exciting event, I can hardly stand it!

Anyway, we’ve got tons to get to today, so let’s!

• I love Ben Wilcock’s look at the 5th anniversary of PCF, Pivotal Cloud Foundry is 5 years old, here’s how it changed my life…
• A Bootiful Podcast: Community Member Nicolas Frankel on Testing, Security, and More
• Reactive Transactions with Spring — check it out.
• Reactor Dysprosium-M1 is available now.
• Spring Data R2DBC 1.0 M2 and Spring Boot starter were released.
• Spring Boot 2.1.5 is out.
• Spring Boot 2.2 M3 is available now.
• Last week, I looked at using Kafka from your Spring Batch ETL flow in this Spring Tips, Spring Tips: Spring Batch and Apache Kafka.
• Spring Integration lead Gary P. Russell has a wonderful post on Spring for Apache Kafka over on the Confluent blog.
• I love the new “Push to Pivotal WS” button on the various Spring guides. Check out this one — Building a RESTful Web Service.
• Have you tried Armeria? It’s an interesting project from Netty-creator Trustin Lee. It has integrations for Spring and it looks kind of interesting.
• Lots of interesting notes by Robert Winkler on the new release of Resilience4J. Check it out!
• Did you see that we announced support for Kotlin-based configuration for Gradle?
• Take a look at the new, reactive Spring Data Neo4j.
• Interesting talk from Andreas Evers on using Spinnaker for cutting-edge continuous delivery.
• Have you seen our GraalVM native image page?
• This is pretty interesting: Spring Cloud Sleuth is used by Netflix!
• Want a quick review of the Kotlin-related announcements from Spring IO? Check out this thread.
• Exciting news! Spring Boot Maven downloads have more than doubled in the past year, and they are up 23 percent in just the last three months. Given that we’re talking about tens of millions of downloads here, those are some impressive numbers!
• And of course, there’s a 138 percent increase over the last year in Spring Cloud downloads!