Hi, Spring fans! Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! As usual, we've got a ton of stuff to get to so let's dive right in!

• Announcing Spring Native Beta!. This is by far the most important bit to come out of the last week! There is SO MUCH good stuff to ponder here. Spring Native is a set of hints that help GraalVM's native-image facility turn your dynamic Java code into a lightning fast, super lightweight, machine architecture-specific binary that you'll definitely want to invite to your next Docker container party. Tons of stuff just works out of the box. Native compilation is even supported on the Spring Initializr - just add Native to the selections! You can use @NativeHint annotations to register certain classes for proxying, reflection, etc. Or, you can implement NativeConfiguration to dynamically register things at compile time. Make sure that you add the .jar containing the NativeConfiguration class to the META-INF/services/ service loader entry for classes of type NativeConfiguration and then add that .jar to the spring-aot Maven plugin's classpath. You can easily build your native image and export a container using Spring Boot's buildpack support: mvn spring-boot:build-image. You'll find tons of samples supporting its use in the repository, too!
• Java 16 is here!. Finally, instanceof pattern matching and record types (record Customer(Integer id, String name) {} ) work out of the box in Java! Congrats to the Java team and, of course, you can expect good support for Java 16 in Spring Boot to land sooner rather than later.
• A Bootiful Podcast: FF4J project creator and DataStax Astra SDK engineer Cedrick Lunven
• Apache Tomcat on Twitter: "Apache Tomcat 8.5.64 has been released. Downloads: https://t.co/gvowEu055P Changelog: https://t.co/J4TCalUgvU" / Twitter
• Deploy Spring Boot applications by leveraging enterprise best practices – Azure Spring Cloud Reference Architecture
• This isn't particularly related to Spring Boot, but, there's an interesting repository on GitHub - ossu/computer-science - that offers a path to a free self-taught education in Computer Science!
• Graceful Shutdown of Spring Boot Applications in Kubernetes by Kaan Taş on the Trendyol Tech blog
• I was on the Devpod podcast and it was a lot of fun and you might enjoy it.
• Java Recognized as the Favorite Programming Language . Of course it was! It's double dope.
• Java in the Cloud Native World, featuring the Starbuxman (Josh Long) | Meetup
• A great thread from Microsoft's Julien Dubois on Twitter: "As Spring Native beta was released last Friday...
• KNative eventing with Spring and Apache Kafka
• Spring Framework 5.3.5 available now
• Tanzu Observability for Wavefront (formerly Wavefront) delivers scalable observability as a service where Spring developers can build analytics-driven dashboards based on multi-sourced data including metrics, traces, histograms, and span logs. The Spring
• The State of Undo panel in which I participated
• The first drop of the Oracle R2DBC driver!
• Deploy Spring Boot apps with enterprise best practices in the Azure Spring Cloud Reference Architecture. Start here