Upgrading takes time. We understand that. Spring Boot 3 came out in November of 2022 bringing with it a new, modernized baseline of Java 17 and the migration from Java EE to Jakarta EE. It included over 55 managed dependency updates. Native compilation via GraalVM was a first-class option across the portfolio and observability out of the box was a core capability of all Spring projects. However, it wasn't until Spring Boot 3.2 where we began to see that the community's adoption of Spring Boot 3 surpassing that of Spring Boot 2's adoption. Spring Boot 3 has quickly overtaken Spring Boot 2 but we still hear from our community about projects to upgrade from Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3.

While we continue to see the pace of innovation across the ecosystem speed up and believe keeping up with that pace of innovation is important, we know that being able to upgrade at your own pace is also a requirement in most enterprises. This is why we have made the decision to extend commercial support for Spring Boot 2.7 and all versions of the portfolio that align with that Spring Boot version until the end of 2026. You can find the updated support dates on each project page. This extra 16 months of support (resulting in a total of more than 8 years of support for the Spring Boot 2.x line) is to provide everyone the ability to prioritize any upgrade needs in alignment with their other priorities.

If staying up to date is a challenge for your enterprise, I'd encourage you to look at this talk by Chris Sterling from our most recent SpringOne. In it, he talks about how OpenRewrite and Tanzu Application Advisor can help automate this problem, taking it from a once every five-year major project, to just a task to do every so often.

Upgrading takes time. We get that. And we are here to make sure that you have what you need to be able to keep your Spring applications up to date and healthy for years to come.