I finally got to review the amazing experience that was SpringOne Platform 2019! The week of the event was a tad insane, and I had scarcely a moment to breath, so here I am several cities, countries, and two weeks later, finally, and I've had a bit of a chance to review. I loved the event because it was in beautiful Austin, Texas, with its lovely weather, delicious BBQ, and abundant live music. The week saw customers, community members and Pivots of all stripes descend on Austin, Texas to speak with one another as cloud natives do.
The show was fun for me because of the people I got to see. I love my Spring teammates. I. Love. Them. Every day they wake up, face the sometimes caustic open source community and deliver class-leading, boss-sauce software while also doing their level-headed best to provide support on the various forums (the Spring Projects and Spring Cloud Gitters, Stackoverflow, Twitter, etc). They're kind, dedicated, generous of conscience and time and effort, and committed. The Spring team has almost no turnover because people believe in the mission, the big picture. I've been on the team for almost a decade and there are at least a dozen people who've been there longer! So I loved the chance to see my teammates here. I also mentioned them in the keynote I emceed. They're amazing.
The thing most struck me about this event was the sheer magnitude of it! The show's gone through many iterations over the years, growing from The Spring Experience, SpringOne, SpringOne2GX and now SpringOne Platform. With the passage of time our community (and customer-base!) has grown. That was abundantly manifest in this year's event. The Spring team brought their A-game, as did the larger Pivotal team. All the technologists got the things they wanted to look great looking great just in time for the show. That, you can assume. But what struck me was what had to happen to enable all of that. It's an eye-watteringly difficult task to turn a theme into a conference that you can buy tickets to. That you can inhabit as a venue. That you can take photos of. The Pivotal marketing team did all that. They are heroines and heroes. They made this thing come to life.
Usually, I love the show because of its a chance to connect with friends. I got to do some of that this year, but not nearly so much as in previous years. This year, unfortunately, I fell victim to my own greed and Spring's rocketing success! I figured I'd not submit anything. I speak ALL YEAR; I just wanted to sit back and take it in! Hard though it may be to believe, even I get tired of hearing myself speak!
Spring's white-hot and we have an amazing community, my favorite garden, if you will to tend to. Every year, at every SpringOne Platform, our partners come out in force. This year was no exception: Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, Netifi, etc., were all there. I didn't submit anything, so when my friends from Microsoft asked me if I wanted to do the joint deep-dive with Microsoft's Julien Dubois debuting the just-announced-at-SpringOne Platform 2019 Azure Spring Cloud, I leaped at the chance. So, that was one net-new talk I had to develop. No big deal. This stuff's easy.
Then my friends Matt Raible (Okta) and James Ward (from Google) asked if I wanted to do a talk. Of course, I did! So, that's two net-new talks I had to develop! Then, finally, I was asked if I wanted to emcee the day 2 keynote. Well, of course, I did! I was honored to even be asked! But now, there I am, 3 net-new talks in, far away from my ideal of just soaking it up. So I spent an inordinate amount of time couped up in hotel rooms preparing demos, talks, and jokes with some of the best technologists in the business. I had a ton of fun and I think I can safely say that my co-presenters did as well. But come the week's end, we were beyond exhausted.
Azure Spring Cloud
Microsoft and Pivotal paired together to build the new runtime on the Azure cloud called Azure Spring Cloud. Azure Spring Cloud is a managed runtime on Azure that delivers the Spring Cloud Services with which you're no doubt familiar – things like the Spring Cloud Config Server, the Spring Cloud Eureka distribution, and the Spring Cloud support for distributed tracing, combined with a push-button simple experience for deploying new applications. The whole thing makes getting a Spring Cloud-based microservice .jar up and running in Azure as painless as it gets! It's amazing. We've been working on this for a long time, and I was so happy to see this finally debut at this show.
You can learn more about Azure Spring Cloud in this blog from Microsoft and this one from Pivotal. Julien Dubois put together an amazing tutorial introducing step-by-step on how to get up and running in the environment here. Behind the scenes, this offering is a hardened, scaled, secured packaging of the familiar Spring Cloud infrastructure services that you know and love. The familiar starters from the existing Spring Cloud Azure project supporting turnkey access to things like Active Directory with Spring Security and Spring Data CosmosDB continue to work. The entire thing sits atop a Microsoft Azure Kubernetes installation.
R2DBC
R2DBC was everywhere_ this year! R2DBC is our SPI for reactive data-access. It defines a core set of interfaces in terms of the Reactive Streams specification. There are a number of different implementations, built from the ground up, supporting databases like PostgreSQL, H2, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, and more. I looked R2DBC in 2018 and I revised that same blog just this week, in light of 2019's revelations.
RSocket
We first introduced RSocket last year at SpringOne Platform 2018 event. It was raw but awesome – rawesome! (I'm going to make that work!) It's now natively integrated into the just-released Spring Framework 5.2 GA release, along with a refined component model supporting the easy definition of services and an easy to use client, the RSocketRequester. It's supported by Spring Framework and Spring Security. It's supported by Spring Cloud Gateway. This binary protocol designed for production should absolutely be on your radar this year. It was a key theme at this year's show with tons of talks introducing the concepts. I looked RSocket in 2018 and I revised that same blog just this week, in light of 2019's revelations. If you've seen me talk about RSocket over the last year (I almost always do), then you've seen me introduce something on the spectrum from raw to awesome. Let me tell you, it's wonderful being on this end of the continuum!
New Releases!
It's like Christmas in July for me! SpringOne heralds a slew of big GA releases from all the major projects you depend on. Right before the show, and just after the show, we saw new GA releases (or at worst some late-stage release candidates) for projects like:
- Spring Framework
- Spring Boot
- Spring Data
- Project Reactor
- Spring Initializr
- Spring for Apache Kafka
- Spring for RabbitMQ
- Spring Security
- Spring Batch
- Spring Integration
…and so much more! (Is this conference driven development? I'll never tell!) Either way, it's a great time to be alive. Get the bits at the second best place on the internet after production!.
Super Preliminary, not Final, But Interesting-to-Try Graal Support
Did you know we debuted super-preliminary, in no-way-intended to be supported, Graal substrate VM support for Spring Boot applications? Try it out! NB: There are apparently some issues with macOS Catalina and Graal that have nothing to do with our particular support. So, this might only work on earlier versions of macOS.
The Cloud's the Limit
This year was amazing but what I love about SpringOne Platforms is that we always debut the polished, refined generation of technologies with which you're no doubt familiar and introduce what we're working on, what's in the pipeline. This year was no different, striking an incredible balance between deliveries and promises.
I had fun, my friends, and I hope you all did too.
