As usual, we’ve got a lot to cover so let’s get to it.

• Spring Cloud ninja Marcin Grzejszczak just announced Spring Cloud Camden SR1. The Spring Cloud release train is such a thing of beauty — just seeing it makes me want to build something cool! It includes Spring Cloud AWS, Bus, Commons, Contract, Config, Netflix, Security, Sleuth, Stream, Task, and Zookeeper.
• Spring Cloud Data Flow co-founder Dr. Mark Pollack just announced Spring Cloud Data Flow 1.1.M2.
• Want help automating the pipeline that sees your application move from a git push to a successfully deployed application in production? Check out the new project, Spring Cloud Pipelines, which is a set of shell scripts that can be plugged in portably across Pivotal Concourse or Jenkins. Remember: microservices are only useful insofar as they help you get to continuous delivery. In continuous delivery you need an automated pipeline and the ability to automatically deploy (naturally, for this we have Pivotal Cloud Foundry)!
• Last week I continued my series of hot-take introductions to various aspect of the Spring ecosystem with the Spring Tips series and looked at how to use Spring with crazy cool Kotlin programming language
• Spring Data and Apache Geode ninja John Blum has released Spring Data Geode 1.0.0.APACHE-GEODE-INCUBATING-M3, which - besides helping migrate from Gemfire to the Geode codebase - also features great Java configuration support for consuming Apache Geode. This stuff is white-hot and I’m embarrassed I neglected to include it before!
• Spring Cloud Camden is packed with great features, one of which is support for defining and consuming service contracts. While this post, in particular, has nothing to do with Spring I think it’s a nice background for people who want to learn about the motivations behind Consumer Driven Contracts and Consumer-Driven Contract Testing
• Speaking of Kotlin, want to learn how some Pivotal Labs engineering folks use Kotlin with (and without!) Spring?
• I though this example application, that demonstrates how to build applications in terms of eventing and Spring Cloud, was worth a look
• Barb Darrow did an ice job in this Fortune magazine article articulating why Google Compute Engine is an amazing place to run Pivotal Cloud Foundry
• The fine folks over at Lightbend just announced support for using Akka, a powerful actor-system, on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Congrats to the teams!