There was a flurry of activity in the Spring ecosystem during the week of March 16th, 2026, highlighting the third milestone releases of: Spring Boot, Spring Security, Spring Integration, Spring AI and Spring AMQP; along with the second milestone releases of Spring Data and Spring for Apache Kafka.
Spring Boot
The third milestone release of Spring Boot 4.1.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: support for the AMQP 1.0 specification that includes auto-configuration of the AmqpConnectionFactory and AmqpClient interfaces; and auto-configuration for Spring Batch using MongoDB with a new spring-boot-batch-data-mongo module. More details on this release may be found in the release notes and this wiki page.
Spring Data
The second milestone release of Spring Data 2026.0.0 ships with notable changes such as: a new @EnableRedisListeners annotation, in Spring Data Redis, that enables listener endpoints for publication and subscription; a new bulkWrite() method, added to the MongoOperations interface in Spring Data MongoDB, that allows for a mix of insert, update and delete operations in one method call; and new compare-and-set and compare-and-delete functionality, for users of Redis 8.4, with new set and delete operations that allows for configuring the command conditions and expiration.
Spring Security
The third milestone release of Spring Security 7.1.0 provides bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new MessageExpressionAuthorizationManager class for authorization of an expression-based message to a public API; and a new InetAddressMatcher interface that allows for general reuse by extracts logic for matching a Java InetAddress class from the Jakarta Servlet HttpServletRequest class.
This release also addresses CVE-2026-22732, a vulnerability that allows an attacker to expose sensitive data via caching mechanisms due to HTTP headers not being written while specifying HTTP response headers for servlet applications using Spring Security.
Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Integration
The third milestone release of Spring Integration 7.1.0 delivers bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new CloudEventHeadersBuilder class that exposes a builder through the headers() method, defined in the CloudEvents class, to configure cloud event headers with direct values; and a replacement of using the Java TimeUnit enum class with the Java Duration class in all of the RedisQueue* classes. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring AI
The third milestone release of Spring AI 2.0.0 ships with bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new McpClientCustomizer interface that allows for customizing a named client component; an improved, more generic, builder pattern in the ZhiPuAiChatOptions class for a more flexible configuration; and a new builder pattern added to the OllamaChatOptions class for more flexible configuration options. Further details on this release, including breaking changes, may be found in the release notes.
Spring AMQP
The third milestone release of Spring AMQP 4.1.0 provides bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new @AmqpListener annotation to support the AMQP 1.0 specification; and a new classic() method, added to the QueueBuilder class, to ensure that a classic queue is set as a default queue if no argument is provided. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring for Apache Kafka
The second milestone release of Spring for Apache Kafka 4.1.0 delivers bug fixes, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new RENEW acknowledgement type and corresponding renew() method, added to the ShareAcknowledgment interface, that extends the acquisition lock on a record when processing takes longer than the configured time; and improvements to the ShareKafkaMessageListenerContainer class that add poll-level and listener-level error handling strategies. Further details on this release may be found in the release notes.
Spring Vault
The first milestone release of Spring Vault 4.1.0 ships with bug fixes, documentation improvements, dependency upgrades and new features such as: a new CertificateContainer class to to issue, obtain and manage certificate bundles; a new ManagedSecret class and SecretsRegistry interface for a more simplified management of secrets, obtained from vault operations, using functional callbacks. More details on this release may be found in the release notes.
