Welcome to another installment of This Week in Spring! This week I'm in Malaysia and then Singapore where I'll spend time with customers in the financial services world and speak at the Singapore Spring User Group on June 8th. If you're around, come out or say hi!

• Spring IO Platform lead and Spring Boot ninja Andy Wilkinson just announced the Gradle Dependency management plugin 1.0.3
• Spring web guru has just announced Spring Web Flow 2.4.5
• the Baeldung blog has a nice look at Spring Boot and Kotlin
• Ranga Karanam put together a nice look at building web applications with Spring Boot
• I liked this blog offering tips and tricks for using the compile-time annotation processor Lombok in production application. Lombok is not a Spring project, obviously, but it's easy to use with Spring and it's available on the Spring Initializr [as a dependency].
• I reallly enjoyed some of the replies in the Quora post When would you choose Couchbase vs MongoDB vs Redis
• Cloud Foundry is dropping Consul from its internal implementation. This design doc / post-mortem looks at why, in this particular case, it makes sense for Cloud Founddry to move Consul out of the stack
• The Baeldung blog also updated their Java 9 Reactive Streams content, which is as-always a worthy read
• I liked this talk by Martin Fowler on the different uses of messaging
• Pivotal's very own Matt Stine put together a nice read, What's your Decomposition Strategy?
• interesting analysis from Bob Evans at Forbes: Sorry Amazon, but Microsoft is the World's #1 Cloud Vendor
• I loved this Dreamworks case-study
• Coda Hale (who, among many things, created the DropWizard Metrics library) put together a great read introducing Little's Law - an approach to modeling system performance - and his new library, usl4j.
• Pivotal's own Joshua McKenty put together a nice piece on how to diversify a cloud portfolio.