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 the paradise-like Paris, France for the epic SpringOne Tour event there, then I'm off to Minsk, Belarus; then off to Barcelona, Spain for JBCN, and then - finally - 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
• Reactor Dysprosium-M1 is Available Now
• Spring Data R2DBC 1.0 M2 and Spring Boot starter released
• Spring Boot 2.1.5 released
• Spring Boot 2.2 M3 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 Confleunt blog
• twitter.com
• 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
• 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(https://twitter.com/springcloud/status/1129081211710787589)
• 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 are up 23% in just the past 3 months. Given that we're talking about tens of millions of downlaods heere, those are some impressive numbers!
• And of course there's a 138% increase over the last year in Spring Cloud downloads!