On behalf of the community, I am pleased to announce that the Milestone 3 (M3) of the Spring Cloud 2021 Release Train is available today. The release can be found in Spring Milestone repository. You can check out the 2021 release notes for more information.

Notable Changes in the 2021 Release Train

Milestone 3 is compatible with Spring Boot 2.6.0-M3.

See the project page for all the issues and pull requests included in this release.

Spring Cloud Gateway

• Added initial support for gRPC #2388

Spring Cloud Function

• Aside form various enhancements and bug fixes this milestone of Spring Cloud Function introduces initial support for gRPC.

Initial documentation is available here. Samples, more documentation and separate blog post are coming as well.

Spring Cloud Vault

• TOKEN auth from file (~/.vault_token) [#609](https://github.com/spring-cloud/spring-cloud-vault/issues/609

Spring Cloud Sleuth

• Added Exemplars support

Spring Cloud Kubernetes

• Added an EnvironmentRepsitory for Config Maps and Secrets to support supplying configuration data from Kubernetes resources using Spring Cloud Config Server. An image is now available for the Spring Cloud Config Server containing this new EnvrionmentRepository implementation is now available on DockerHub. Documentation for using this new feature is provided here. #881

• Added a new Kubernetes DiscoveryClient implementation which takes advantage of a new Kubernetes Discovery Sever. #886

The following modules were updated as part of 2021.0.0-M3:

As always, we welcome feedback on GitHub, on Gitter, on Stack Overflow, or on Twitter.

To get started with Maven with a BOM (dependency management only):

    <repositories>
        <repository>
            <id>spring-milestones</id>
            <name>Spring Milestones</name>
            <url>https://repo.spring.io/milestone</url>
            <snapshots>
                <enabled>false</enabled>
            </snapshots>
        </repository>
    </repositories>
<dependencyManagement>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-cloud-dependencies</artifactId>
            <version>2021.0.0-M3</version>
            <type>pom</type>
            <scope>import</scope>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</dependencyManagement>
<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-config</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.cloud</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-client</artifactId>
    </dependency>
    ...
</dependencies>

or with Gradle:

buildscript {
dependencies {
classpath "io.spring.gradle:dependency-management-plugin:1.0.2.RELEASE"
}
}

repositories {
maven {
url 'https://repo.spring.io/milestone'
}
}

apply plugin: "io.spring.dependency-management"

dependencyManagement {
imports {
mavenBom 'org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-dependencies:2021.0.0-M3'
}
}

dependencies {
compile 'org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-starter-config'
compile 'org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-client'
...
}