Two updates to the Spring Cloud have come a step closer, hitting M2 status with RC1 promised in the “next few weeks.”

Spring Cloud Data Flow and Spring Cloud Skipper feature revamped metrics and monitoring of applications, an improved dashboard and the addition of new security roles.

Data Flow is an orchestration service for microservices using Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry while Skipper lets you find applications on different cloud platforms and manage them centrally.

Data Flow 2.0 introduces a new architecture to collect and display metrics for Streams, used to build scalable, event-driven microservices.

The architecture uses the Micrometer library inside of deployed applications to send metrics to a monitoring system and to Grafana for visualisation.

Micrometer provides a set of vendor-neutral interfaces for metrics-gathering and reporting features integrated with SpringBoot – the open-source Java framework for creating micro services.  Links to the Grafana dashboard from the Data Flow UI and two Grafana dashboards are included in this release.

The M2 release also debuts instructions for getting started with Prometheus and InfluxDB, to monitor Data Flow on your laptop, with instructions for CloudFoundry and Kubernetes due in R1.

Security changes see Data Flow now compatible with OAuth1/OpenIDConnect for token-based authorisation. Also added are roles that let you govern the deployment of Streams and tasks.

Changes to the UI include the ability to launch a task against a collection of back end platforms, the ability to enable or disable functionality based on roles, and the addition of a button that lets you rollback to an earlier version of a Stream.