Spring Cloud 2025.0.2 (Northfields) Released
Spring Cloud 2025.0.2, codenamed Northfields, was released on April 2, 2026, delivering maintenance updates aligned to Spring Boot 3.5.13. The Northfields train is the current stable generation for teams running Spring Boot 3.5.x, and this point release resolves reported bugs and dependency updates across the Spring Cloud ecosystem.
Spring Cloud acts as the integration layer for Spring-based microservices — wiring together service discovery, distributed configuration, circuit breakers, API gateways, and distributed tracing. The Northfields release keeps the component versions of Spring Cloud Gateway, Spring Cloud Config, Spring Cloud LoadBalancer, Spring Cloud Circuit Breaker, and related modules in step with the latest Spring Boot 3.5 patch. For production teams, staying current with point releases in the Northfields train is the recommended posture while Spring Cloud for Spring Boot 4 (based on the upcoming 2026.x release train) continues development.
Teams using Spring Boot 3.5.x in production should test the 2025.0.2 upgrade in a staging environment before rolling out — the dependency alignment changes can surface in transitive dependency resolution depending on your build tool. Migration notes and the complete changelog are available on the Spring Cloud releases page on GitHub.
Read more — Spring Blog
Spring I/O 2026: Spring Boot 4 and Spring AI Take Center Stage in Barcelona
Spring I/O 2026, running April 14–15 in Barcelona, Spain, is the premier community conference for the Spring ecosystem and this year's agenda is heavily focused on the next-generation Spring stack. Josh Long opened coverage from Barcelona with "This Week in Spring" on April 14, highlighting the event as a showcase for Spring Boot 4, Spring Framework 7, Spring AI, and observability topics in production microservices.
Spring Boot 4 and Spring Framework 7 represent a major generational shift: the baseline Java version moves to Java 17 minimum (with Java 21 as the recommended target), the build infrastructure migrates to Gradle conventions, and core APIs that were deprecated over the Spring Boot 3.x cycle are removed. Spring AI, which is tracking its 2.0.0 milestone releases in parallel, gets prominent coverage at the conference — the framework has matured rapidly through the 1.x releases and now covers tool calling, RAG pipelines, multimodal input, vector store integrations, and MCP client support.
The observability track at Spring I/O reflects how central Micrometer and distributed tracing have become to production Spring deployments. Sessions cover correlating traces with virtual thread workloads, integrating OpenTelemetry collectors with Spring Boot's auto-configured tracing, and using Spring Boot Actuator dashboards for runtime insight into bean injection, endpoint security posture, and live configuration values — all capabilities that IntelliJ IDEA 2026.1 has also started surfacing via Spring runtime insight tooling.
For Java teams that haven't started evaluating the Spring Boot 4 migration path, Spring I/O 2026 materials (sessions recorded and published post-event) are a good starting point. The Spring team has documented breaking changes and provides a migration guide; teams running Spring Boot 3.2 or earlier should treat the upgrade planning as a multi-sprint effort given the scale of API removals.
Read more — Spring Blog
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