Last week it was the first time I attend Spring One Platform conference in Austin. It is the conference all around the Spring Framework. A very vibrant open source framework which coordinates by Pivotal.
Road to Austin
A friend of my has joined me (again), so we flew on a direct KLM flight to Houston and drove over to Austin. We stayed in a very pleasant hide-away in the very nice neighbourhood Travis Heights. The swimming pool was very useful as the weather was very hot even for Austin.
Spring boot runs everywhere
The power of Spring Boot application was the ability to run almost everywhere. Now they expand it even further.
Good to see that Spring Boots app not only requires a Cloud Foundry environment, as the applications will also natively on Google Cloud, Azure, AWS and even Heroku.
Everything is reactive
The overall theme was reactive. The last years there was a rise of non-blocking way of communicating between front end and back end. Pivotal is taking it to the next level, with introducing the Reactive way in all the Spring modules.
The project Reactor is the base of the JVM based projects. But also by using Rsocket, which is an alternative for http communication. This protocol opens up lots of new possibilities like 2 way communications. And it can ends the use of connection pools.
On the database connection, R2DBC is a new project which makes even the calls and transactions to a relational datastore non-blocking.
In all these Reactive projects Pivotal is heavily involved.
Streams everywhere
Another big topic was Streams. Pivotal have introduced Spring Cloud Stream to make it super easy to connect your application to a Business Event Bus, like Kafka or RabbitMQ.
Eventually it is nothing more a binder. You only have to focus on your business logic and let the Framework worry about to connect.
Conference overall
Over the past years I attend a lot of conferences, like IBM Think or IBM Connect. I must say it was a pleasant new experience. Well organised, good food. BUT the coffee was typical ‘see-through’ American style.
The customer stories were very interesting. JP Morgan shared their shift to Devops on a large scale in the financial world, which has their own compliance challenges. Dick’s Sport Goods did a live failover of their Search service during a key note with a top quote ‘Or we learned something or we are the hero’s.
Netflix shared their experiences with the Spring framework and services they initially developed, who are now inside the core of Spring Cloud. For example Hystrix and Circuit Breaker
Nevertheless I enjoyed it very much and looking forward for Spring One 2020 in Seattle (21-24 September).
Sessions recordings
On YouTube you can view all the sessions, which will be available or in the near future.
Unconferencing
After a busy conference I like it do something else before heading home. This year we drove down to Galveston to stay on the beach for more then a day.
On Friday the temperature dropped dramatically with 20 degrees, but nevertheless it was worth to enjoy the beach before we flew back from Houston back home
