Recapping the Highlights: Our Experience at the 10th Spring IO Conference
– by Piotr Ostapczuk, Senior Software Engineer
May
Barcelona
60 Speakers
Have you ever been to a Spring Framework conference? Well, together with Piotr Filipowicz and Artur Kruszewski we were there representing Inspeerity, in Catalonia!
The 10th Spring IO conference, held in Barcelona, opened to classical music with a dubstep twist, followed by an appearance by Juergen Hoeller, the founder of the Spring project. He noted that 2023 was a special year as it marks 20 years of the Spring Framework project, 10 years of Spring Boot, and the 10th edition of the conference.
So, what is the Spring team currently focusing on?
On the first day, most presentations’ ran with the theme of “scaling to 0” and how to achieve this. But the focus was on using GraalVM and reducing cold start times. Alina Yurenko explained the benefits of native application images, how they work, and how they can reduce costs. An important thing to note is that GraalVM supports reflection BUT may require additional configurations for more sophisticated calls.
The Spring team also focused on reimplementing JDBC connections to Virtual Threads (Project Loom), which sounds promising.
Can CRaC revolutionize application deployment with its lightning-fast startup times?
However, I was most interested in the CRaC project, which is basically a JVM implementation of Checkpoint Restore. The idea is to take a snapshot of an application and deploy it in milliseconds. Sébastien Deleuze showed a comparison of container startup to application readiness and a comparison of the same application on 1 CPU and 2 GB of memory running the “old way” that started up in 6900 ms. Using CRaC it started up in 309 ms and 87 ms “natively.”
Docker magic and openAPI contracts
By far the best presentation was by Josh Long, whose talk was full of humor and fast code writing. He showed that Spring Boot 3.1 has an interesting new ability to load credentials from docker-compose files and testcontainers just by using @ServiceConnection annotation. No more test configurations!
Another interesting lecture was about publishing openAPI contracts from services in the spring cloud gateway, as this relates to issues I am currently facing in our project.
Also, Marcin Grzejszczak and Tommy Ludwig’s presentation on observability and related tools such as Micrometer was very interesting. What surprised me most was how far Grafana has matured over the years. It has taken a long time to make it easy to set up.
A summary of my time
In summary, the event proved to be a valuable experience. Attending the conference provided us with the chance to engage with representatives from various companies. It was enjoyable to share knowledge with fellow developers and to have the opportunity to meet the creators of the Spring project, expressing our gratitude for their exceptional work and contributions to this remarkable Open-Source initiative.
We came back with more knowledge, and we are looking forward to how they will surprise us with the next Spring/Spring Boot releases.
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That’s not everything
Proba Mikrofonu is part of a larger, ongoing project to build the soft skills of our developers. Apart from the larger events, we also run a series of Podcasts, written, and designed by our team. The Bluzbothers podcasts are a way for our developers to share personal insights, stories, and advice about a variety of topics.
Come listen in on how our developers are sharing their knowledge.
