SpringOne Platform is the successor of SpringOne 2GX, with a focus mainly on Spring and Cloud Foundry. Next to these technical topics, SpringOne Platform also offered many sessions on cultural transformation and DevOps. Cultural transformation and DevOps are key to deliver meaningful solutions more quickly. This can be achieved by creating empowered teams, able to make independent decisions. To implement these collaborative teams, leadership buy-in is hugely important. Getting away from legacy thinking will allow enterprises to obtain short feedback cycles and thus continuously improve.

From Imperative To Reactive Web Apps - Rossen Stoyanchev

The marquee feature of Spring 5, will be first class support for Reactive Web applications. Reactive programming is about non-blocking, event-driven applications with back-pressure. Back-pressure helps to ensure a good collaboration between producers and consumers. The Reactive Manifesto is an interesting read on this topic.

To support reactive, Spring 5 will use Project Reactor (led by Stéphane Maldini) through the Spring Web Reactive project. This blogpost, by Rossen Stoyanchev is a nice starting point to learn about Flux, Mono and the Spring Reactive world.

Managing Secrets at Scale - Mark Paluch

In a world, where we run large amounts of microservices in orchestrated containers, we can never forget about security, encrypting passwords, storing keys, rotating secrets, etc. Today, applications consume both first and third party APIs and need authentication and authorization to do this in a safe way. Traditional patterns cannot keep the security bar high with dynamic deployment scenarios.

As a Secure-By-Design company, this talk immediately caught my attention. In a Spring world, we can use Spring Cloud Vault Config, wrapping Vault. An interesting tutorial on this Spring library is available on spring.io.

Slides from the talk are available online.

It’s not you, it’s us: Winning over people for yourself and the team - Neha Batra

This was one of the non-technical talks, but aimed to help with the daily management of technical projects. Neha’s session was the most interactive one I attended at SpringOne Platform: about 10 minutes in the session, she wanted us to pair to do a personal SWOT analysis with a stranger in the room and see how we can learn from each other. Everyone participated and I believe this might actually be useful in the context of a project. Something to try out!

She ended her session with a tool chest to prevent and mitigate issues as they come up:

• SWOT analysis
• Personal goals
• Inception
• Set schedule / cadence
• Provide feedback
• Provide a “safe haven”
• Collect and discuss concerns
• Talk in person
• Write down useful conversations
• Find a way to align first (eg. TDD + pair programming)
• Daily retros

The slidedeck of her talk is available on Slideshare.

Ordina

Ordina was represented at SpringOne Platform with 2 speakers and 3 talks:

Writing your own Spring Boot Starter - Dieter Hubau

Dieter Hubau gave a very nice introduction on how to write your own Spring Boot Starter. A Spring Boot Starter is the de-facto standard tool for starting with a greenfield Spring project. He started by explaining the magic behind Spring Boot Starters (and @AutoConfiguration) and ended with a cool game of Josh Long Pokemon, deployed on Cloud Foundry.

His slides are available here.

Writing Comprehensive and Guaranteed Up-to-date REST API Documentation - Andreas Evers

Andreas Evers talked about Spring REST Docs to generate documentation that is always up to date. To achieve this, a test-driven approach can be used: generate snippets from integration tests. Combine these snippets with manually written templates and finally generate HTML. Personally, I have always been a huge fan of “documentation-as-code” and Spring REST Docs is a great tool to achieve this goal.

His slides are available here. This blogpost by Kevin Van Houtte provides more insight and examples on Spring REST Docs.

Ignite: Microservices Dashboard - Andreas Evers

On Monday evening, Andreas pitched the Ordina Microservices Dashboard that was released a couple of hours earlier. The Ordina Microservices Dashboard left a big impression:

Definitely worth checking out.

Simplifying the Future - Adrian Cockroft

The closing keynote at SpringOne Platform was reserved for one of the most influential people in our industry: Adrian Cockcroft. Always at the edge of technology, Adrian often is credited with making Microservices a mature and useful architectural pattern. His talk focussed on:

• Simplifying work
• Simplify the organization
• Simplify things we build

I really recommend watching his entire presentation on YouTube.