Hi Spring fans! How's things? I'm in Taipei, Taiwan, where I've presented at the local JUG and at the Cloud Native Forum. It's been a crazy good time on the ground eating delicious "stinky tofu" (that's its name!), trying to figure out the difference between traditional Chinese characters and so-called simplified Chinese characters used in China, and of course making tons of new friends.

In less than 24h I'll be on a plane winging my way back west where I'll join my family, and our newest addition, and our friends, and we'll celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday together. It's this time of year when I try to take stock of all the things for which I'm grateful and you know what, dear reader? Time and time again, I think of you, the community that makes Spring the best place to integrate and innovate. I am thankful for you. I'm sure I speak for the Spring team and Pivotal at large when I say, we are thankful for you.

From all of us to all of you: Happy Thanksgiving!

Now, we've got a ton to cover so let's get to it!

• Spring Cloud Stream Fishtown.RC2 /2.1.0.RC2 Release Announcement
• Announcing Spring Cloud Function - 2.0.0.RC2
• Spring Session 1.3.4 Released
• Spring Vault 2.1.1, 2.0.3, and 1.1.3 released
• Spring Cloud Pipelines to Cloud Pipelines Migration
• This looks interesting: it's an e-book on Spring Microservices that is, for today, available for free!
• Customizing HTTP Endpoints in Spring Data REST | Baeldung
• An updated oldie-but-a-goodie on validation groups in Spring MVC
• Check out Sebastien Deleuze's talk on using Spring Boot and Kotlin with functional config using R2DBC and PostgreSQL. He compiles the application using Graal's SubstrateVM and it starts in single digit milliseconds.
• This is a nice post on using Spring Boot in separate Java 9 modules
• Learn how to go Full Stack Reactive with Spring WebFlux, WebSockets, and React in this new screencast on the Okta YouTube channel. It's a screencast-ification of the blog series that Matt Raible and I threw together a few months ago
• I love this. First, it's nice that Amazon have a new OpenJDK build. The more the merrieer! Tangentially, I loved this insight from JHipster lead Julien Dubois on Twitter : "Really funny that AWS Corretto is named after an Italian beverage, which is a coffee with some alcohol in it! We have the same beverage in the North of France (of course!), and we call it a "bistouille", so I'm waiting for Google.. :D
• The 2019 SpringOne Tour dates are all posted!
• Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, has a nice post on Cloud Foundry: a Do-It Yourself Platform-as-a-service
• Need 24x7 ETL? Then Move to Cloud Native File Ingest with Spring Cloud Data Flow
• It's nice to see Spring Framework on the latest Thoughtworks Tech Radar
• This website has a ton of interesting content on Project Reactor
• I love this bit of Pivotal corporate news thart has absolutely nothing to do with Spring but that deserves as wide an airing as possible: "This month, we signed the Business Statement on Transgender Equality with over 100 other companies.
• Pivotal PKS just won a 2018 Tech Innovator Award for best Container Platform.
• Spring Boot lead Phil Webb has listed some of the side projects that've come out of Spring Boot to support the development of Spring Boot easier - this is a great thread!