Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Istanbul, Turkey, talking to customers and participating in the epic SpringOne Platform Istanbul event and, otherwise, generally preparing for the flagship SpringOne Platform 2018 event in just a few short weeks

Let's get into it!

• Spring Security lead Josh Cummings just announced Spring Security 5.1.0.RC2. The new release supports a ton of new stuff, including a simplified DSL for OAuth 2, WebClient extensions, servlet enhancements, improved resource server support, improved RestTemplate support, support for X.509, and the use of environment variables for configuring LDAP.
• Mark Paluch has just announced the packed Spring Data Ingalls SR15 and Spring Data Kay SR10.
• Mark Paluch has just announced Spring Vault 2.0.2, which delivers dependency updates and some minor bug fixes.
• Mark Paluch just announced the Spring Vault 2.1 release candidate. Spring Vault 2.1 requires JDK 8 or higher and specifically supports JDK 11 as the next long-term support release. This release ships with 15 tickets fixed along with some refinements for Java 9 to 11. The most notable changes are supported for Azure authentication with managed service instances on VMs, GCP IAM authentication support on behalf of service accounts, and the release is compatible with Vault versions from 0.5.2 up to 0.11.1.
• Continuing my eight-part series that looks at using Spring Cloud with Google Cloud, this seventh installment looks at using Spring Cloud GCP to connect to other GCP Services.
• Stéphane Nicoll just announced Spring Framework 5.1 RC3, 5.0.9 and 4.3.19.
• Continuing my eight-part series that looks at using Spring Cloud with Google Cloud, this sixth installment looks at supporting observability with Spring Cloud GCP Stackdriver Trace.
• Laís Neves looks at her experience at the WoMakersCode conference where she spoke about making Java fun again with Spring Boot in this Portuguese-language post.
• Sajal Chakraborty has a nice post on using Spring's RMI and Hessian service exporters support in a modern Spring Boot context.
• This new Packt book, Software Architecture with Spring 5.0, looks interesting. I'm adding it to my "To Read"list.
• This post on using Spring Boot and Hazelcast is helpful. This is pretty apropos, given that I'm in Istanbul, Turkey, where Hazelcast debuted!
• I'm honored to be included in this list of top 20 Java influencers.
• Check out Jakub Pilimon's epic guide to a couple of possible ways of doing CQRS with the Spring Stack.
• Check out this nice post looking at the Graal VM: "The Graal Frenzy."
• Alican Akkus did a nice post on "Consumer-Driven Contract With Spring Boot."
• JUnit 5.3 is released! It includes parallel test execution, output capturing, a new TestInstanceFactory Extension API, and so much more
• This is a nice post on the Five Unexpected Journeys for an Ops Teams at the epic SpringOne Platform 2018 event coming in just a few short weeks!