Spring Boot 2.3 Highlights: Dependency Upgrades, Java 14, Docker & More

Dependency Upgrades

New version core component dependencies upgraded

Spring Data Neumann

Spring HATEOAS 1.1

Spring Integration 5.3

Spring Kafka 2.5

Spring Security 5.3

Spring Session Dragonfruit

Third‑party component dependencies

Cassandra Driver 4.6

Couchbase Client 3.0

Elasticsearch 7.6

Kafka 2.5

Micrometer 1.5

MongoDB 4.0

Java 14 Support

Spring Boot 2.3.0 supports Java 14 and remains compatible with Java 11 and Java 8.

Docker Container Support

Spring Boot 2.3.0 adds features to help package applications directly into Docker images.

Support for Cloud Native Buildpacks to build images

Maven plugin adds spring-boot:build-image; Gradle adds bootBuildImage task for fast image creation

Support for layered jars to better optimise the image build process

Graceful Shutdown

All four embedded web servers (Jetty, Reactor Netty, Tomcat, Undertow) and both reactive and servlet‑based web applications support graceful shutdown.

After configuring a shutdown grace period, the server stops accepting new requests and waits for the period to allow active requests to complete.

Service Availability Probes

Spring Boot 2.3.0 includes built‑in health‑check functionality to determine if the application is alive and ready to receive traffic. See the liveness‑and‑readiness‑probes documentation for details.

Other Changes

Full release notes are available in the Spring‑Boot‑2.3‑Release‑Notes. A list of deprecated classes and methods removed in the next version is also provided.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all users and contributors; over 680 people have contributed code with more than 26 000 commits.

Reference

Cloud Native Buildpacks: https://buildpacks.io

liveness-and-readiness-probes-with-spring-boot: https://spring.io/blog/2020/03/25/liveness-and-readiness-probes-with-spring-boot

Spring-Boot-2.3-Release-Notes: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/wiki/Spring-Boot-2.3-Release-Notes