Spring Boot was first released four years ago in 2014. In 2018, a newer version of Spring Boot was released. There are many new features and updates in Spring Boot 2.0. Here are some of the most important changes:

• There are many new packages and Starters that help with dependency management.
• Spring Boot 2.0 also supports auto-configuration. This helps in reducing the configuration that was needed in previous Spring apps.
• It has introduced better longing through features like Actuator.
• Software quality testing and utilities have been enhanced. This helps in a better user experience. With spring-boot-devtools, you can have much more enhanced feedback loops.
• Spring Boot 2.0 supports Java version 8 and greater only. It is one of the few options available where you can use the latest Java 9.
• The Gradle plugin is replaced by BootJar and BootWar.
• The dependency management plugin is no longer activated automatically.
• It's far more secure.
• Reactive models have new starters of different types, such as WebFlux.
• Actuator has been upgraded with huge changes. Earlier, only Spring MVC could be supported by Actuator, but with version 2.0, Actuator is independent.

You can see that a lot of exciting new features and enhancements can be found in Spring Boot 2.0. So in this book, we will look at many of these new features with examples.