Hi Spring fans and welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Hong Kong for the amazing YOW! Hong Kong event and then it's off to Singapore for the YOW! Singapore event. If you're in either region, these conferences are world-class events from Australia and they're new in the region so I hope you'll give them a shot.

• Check out this first of many introductions to various aspects of Spring Cloud Data Flow. This first introduction, by Spring Cloud Data Flow ninja Eric Bottard, looks at the Spring Cloud Data Flow shell itself.
• Spring Cloud contributor Ryan Baxter just announced Spring Cloud Edgeware M1. The new release includes updates to the various projects as well as the new Spring Cloud Gateway project. This version is based on Spring Boot 1.5.x.
• Spring Cloud co-founder Spencer Gibb just announced Spring Cloud Finchely M2. This new release is based on Spring Boot 2.0.x and so has a Java 8-baseline. It also supports a lot more cool features in Spring Cloud Gateway. A common theme of this release, in Spring Cloud Gateway and other releases, is reactive support.
• Spring Cloud Data Flow ninja Thomas Risberg introduces the Helm installer for Spring Cloud Data Flow for Kubernetes in this post. Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes.
• This Pivotal and Apigee whitepaper on application modernization was a pretty good read
• This is an oldie-but-a-goodie from earlier this year by Matt McCandless called Spring Boot: The Right Boot for You
• this post on the Quartz Scheduler with Spring Boot was a blast-from-the-past sort of article. I dig it.
• It's looking like there will be a 6 month cadence for new Java releases after Java 9 ships. I personally welcome this idea.
• I really liked this Russian-language post introducing application development with Spring Boot.
• Last week Pivotal, in conjunction with Google and VMWare, announced a very important next step for the Pivotal Cloud Foundry ecosystem - Pivotal Container Service - a Kubernetes-service managed by BOSH. Get the skinny on how we got here from this TechCrunch piece
• I loved this Auth0 piece on integrating Spring Boot with a SQL database (PostgreSQL), JPA and Liquibase.
• this post from JHipster on Doing API-First development was interesting.
• Spring Boot 2.0, with a reactive Spring Framework 5 and Java 8 baseline, is sure to impress. One of my favorite features in the new release is REST-stack agnostic (reactive Spring WebFlux, Spring MVC or JAX-RS) support for the Spring Boot Actuator endpoints, which this blog post details.
• Check out this excellent webinar on why IntelliJ IDEA is the premier choice for Grails applications. I love this because Grails 3 is based on Spring Boot and because Jeff Scott Brown's a great speaker and because IntelliJ make a pretty darned good IDE.
• This isn't strictly-speaking related to Spring, but it is a worthy read. Daniel Bryant describes a wholistic approach to testing microservices - and all the components you might use withint them - in this post.
• I liked this StackOverflow response from Spring Data lead Oliver Gierke: How do I selectively upgrade a dependency in Spring Boot?
• Read this post if you want a quick introduction to what a Cloud Foundry service broker is.
• This is also not strictly speaking related to Spring, but it could very well be useful to a number of Spring users building cloud-native applications: Cost Reduction Strategies on Java Cloud Hosting Services