Hello world! Since we last talked, I've been in multiple cities in China, including Hangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, talking to customers and community members alike. It's fascinating to see what our amazing customers in China do with our technologies in the hypercompetitive Chinese market. And, tasty!

• Spring Cloud Camden is almost here! Spring Cloud co-founder Spencer Gibb just announced Spring Cloud Camden RC1, which in turn includes a lot of improvements and a really cool new module, Spring Cloud Contract
• Spring for Apache Kafka lead Artem Bilan just announced that Spring for Apache Kafka 1.1 GA and Spring Integration Kafka 2.1 GA are now available
• Spring Integration ninja Artem Bilan has also just announced that Spring Integration 4.3.2 has just been released, with polish around the RMI adapters, TCP, and a few new global tweaks like spring.integration.readOnly.headers global property. This is a small but worthy update on the journey to Spring Integration 5.0, with a milestone due in a month's time!
• Spring framework ninja Stéphane Nicoll has just announced Spring framework 4.3.3 and 4.2.8 are now available
• Spring Cloud Data Flow ninja Thomas Risberg just announced Spring Cloud Data Flow 1.1 M1 and 1.0.1 GA! The 1.1 M1, in particular, is very exciting! It adds LDAP backend support, HTTP BASIC backend authentication, file backend authentication, Spring Boot 1.3 and 1.4 support, UI improvements, and a slew of other niceties.
• Never one to relax, Spring Integration Java DSL lead Artem Bilan also just announced 1.2 M2, which includes JPA support, mid-flow transaction support, scatter-gather support, improved routers, and more!
• Spring Security and Spring Session lead Rob Winch just announced Spring Session 1.3.0 M2 which is packed with first class support for Hazelcast, support for Spring Security concurrent session management, a Redis JSON serialization example, easier configuration for the Redis cleanup task and lots of performance improvements and bug fixes. Get it while it's hot!
• I really dig this post from community hero Michael Simmons on running [Hibernate Search on Pivotal Cloud Foundry with ElasticSearch](http://info.michael-simons.eu/2016/09/20/running-hibernate-search-with-elasticsearch-on-pivotal-cf/
• I really liked this talk by Alex Blewitt on the internals of Hotspot. Also: check out his epic tie!
• I was very interested to learn about this configuration server from eBay Shanghai, called YiDB. Might be worth a look!
• this blog from Riot Games on some of the optimizations they've made when using Zuul is very informative
• this is a very cool talk from JavaZone by Sebastian Dehne on zero-downtime deployments with database changes.
• speaking of, there is a very cool thread in the Spring Cloud Netflix Github Issues on using Eureka for 0-downtime blue/green deployments
• Java 9 will, unfortunately, be delayed 4 months
• I dig this look at edge service choices and - in particular - at the look at Netflix Zuul filters which you can of course use with Spring Cloud Netflix