May 19, 2023 4 min read conference

Spring I/O 2023

I had a lot of fun at Spring I/O in Barcelona, Spain. The conference is entirely focused on the Spring Ecosystem.

I had a lot of fun at Spring I/O in Barcelona, Spain. The conference is entirely focused on the Spring Ecosystem. This year's sponsors included VMware (Spring Academy), Solo Inc. (hmm, they also aim at developers now?), AtomicJar, Microsoft Azure, and Elastic. The conference organization and speakers' treatment is premium, to say the least, as all speakers got customized Spring sneakers 👟.

Testcontainers from AtomicJar is well recognized and used all over the place for Java Applications. There is consensus about their cloud offering and their developer experience.

LocalStack is a company that provides AWS APIs for testing. You can start these APIs as a container and run your applications against them for testing. Testcontainers Cloud runs loads instances of LocalStack everyday. Unfortunately, there is no support for GCP or Azure as of today.

GraalVM is not being used yet. People are aware of it, but still not a lot of adoption. The fact that Spring Boot with CNCF Buildpacks doesn't support arm64 architecture and multiplatform containers is a limiting factor.

Kotlin for developer experience and developer satisfaction with Spring Boot. Fewer lines of code, full Java compatibility, known as Better Java.

The Spring Boot community knows about Kubernetes. Almost 70% of the attendees to my session are using Kubernetes. But it seems it is being used just for deployments, and Platform Engineering is still in its early days in these communities.

Knative was mentioned in several sessions but not demonstrated in action, besides a Knative workshop from VMware. An interesting aspect of Spring I/O is that there is almost no presence from Red Hat (except my friend Alex Soto talking about progressive delivery on Kubernetes), so there is less Kubernetes than in other conferences.

There was a bit about Spring Cloud Functions and Azure Spring Cloud, which was interesting but I will need to spend more time digging into the details.

Besides a few people, Dapr was new to this audience, but the integration with Testcontainers made the project available to them and their day-to-day tasks. If you are interested in Dapr being a Java Developer, you can start using the Dapr Java SDKs or trying out the examples with Testcontainers here.

I look forward to seeing how these topics evolve for the Spring community next year.

Unrelated news

I was surprised to see the news at TechCrunch about a new software supply chain Startup Stacklok.

This startup was founded by Luke Hinds, and Craig McLuckie and caught me off guard, as Chainguard (pun intended) has been making a lot of noise in that space. Their mission statement sounds nice, but it makes me wonder about the shape of the product they are building:

"So I had this idea of building this sort of supply chain ledger to have observability and transparency into the supply chain. So start with a really good foundation where everything that's in there has non-repudiation and a cryptographic signature. So you know it's tied to an identity, whether that be a machine or a human. So if we start with a really good trust foundation — a fabric of trust — then we can start to layer on top of that stack."

Security and Software Supply Chain security is definitely an interesting space that I am not really into, but it all sounds too blurry and not very concrete. I am looking forward to seeing something that I can try out so I can get my head around how the solutions built by these companies are solving real-life challenges.

Switching topics entirely, another space I am unfamiliar with is the Storage world on Kubernetes. Projects like Rook had been around for a while now. Funny enough Rook was forked into Koor Tech (gosh, the naming is .. I can't even explain it). I will keep my eyes open to determine what is happening there. Forks like this rarely happen unless there are some politics involved. Similar news about OpenEBS -> https://github.com/openebs/openebs/issues/3634, which will be withdrawn from the CNCF.