Spring Boot 4.1 Ships gRPC, OpenTelemetry, and AMQP 1.0

Spring Boot 4.1 is here, and project lead Phil Webb sat down with Dan Vega and DaShaun Carter on the Spring Office Hours podcast to run through what's new. This release isn't a flashy rewrite—it's a solid set of additions that working Spring teams will actually use.

gRPC Goes First-Class

The biggest headline is first-class gRPC support. Spring Boot 4.1 introduces auto-configuration for gRPC servers and clients, letting you spin up a gRPC endpoint with the same @GrpcService annotation you'd use for REST. No more wiring up protobuf manually or fighting with Netty boilerplate. It integrates with the existing Actuator health checks and metrics, so your gRPC services are observable out of the box.

OpenTelemetry Gets Beefier

OpenTelemetry support has been expanded beyond basic tracing. Spring Boot 4.1 adds automatic instrumentation for gRPC calls, R2DBC database queries, and Kafka producers/consumers. The management.otlp configuration namespace now covers metrics and logs export, not just traces. If you've been holding off on adopting OpenTelemetry because the Spring integration felt half-baked, this release closes the gap.

MongoDB + Spring Batch

Spring Batch finally gets a MongoDB-based job repository. Previously, batch job metadata had to live in a relational database. Now you can store job executions, step contexts, and status in MongoDB, which is a big deal for teams running batch pipelines in document-store environments. No more forcing a relational DB into your stack just for job metadata.

AMQP 1.0 and RabbitMQ Streams SSL

AMQP 1.0 support lands in Spring AMQP, alongside SSL support for RabbitMQ Streams. The AMQP 1.0 addition is particularly relevant as more messaging infrastructure moves beyond the classic 0-9-1 protocol. RabbitMQ Streams users get TLS without extra configuration gymnastics.

Log4j File Rotation

Log4j 2 now supports file rotation policies out of the box in Spring Boot's auto-configuration. It's a small quality-of-life improvement, but one that ops teams will appreciate when they don't have to write custom log4j2.xml files just to rotate logs by size or time.

For the full changelog, check the official release notes and the release highlights page.