Spring Boot 2.4 GA: Still No Native Images

What’s This About?

It’s that time of the year again. Two weeks after Spring 5.3, Spring Boot gets its moment in the sun: Version 2.4 is here on November 12, 2020.

What’s NOT in the Release?

Support for creating native programs through GraalVM. This work happens in a separate project. It will go into beta in December 2020. But only Spring Boot 3, based on Spring 6, is “expected to provide first-class support for native application deployment”. In other words: Fall 2021, maybe. 😒

Ok, so What IS in the Release?

• Spring Boot 2.4 is based on Spring 5.3 and runs with Java 15.
• In Spring Boot 2.3, we could create Docker images out of the box. With Spring Boot 2.4, we can push these images to a Docker repository, like Docker Hub. See the Maven and Gradle plugin documentation for details.
• The config file processing was overhauled. Simple config files should stay the same. But we can now import configuration trees that are often used with Kubernetes. See this migration guide for details.
• We can now identify program parts that are slow to start up. A so-called actuator tells us. It builds upon application startup tracking in Spring 5.3.
• A lot of dependencies were updated, such as Spring Data 2020.0.

This is the complete “New and Noteworthy” section.

Should I Upgrade?

Yes. But this is a major Spring Boot release. So it’ll be a while until all your dependencies catch up.

Where Can I Get It?

You update the Spring BOot version numbers in your Maven/Gradle build files. Here is the upgrade guide.

When Is the Next Major Spring Boot Release Due?

Spring Booth 2.5 should arrive in about six months. That would be May 2021. It already is a milestone on Github but has no date.