Infinispan 9.0.0.Alpha1 is out!

Dear Infinispan community,

it is with great pleasure that we are announcing the release of Infinispan 9.0.0.Alpha1 the first release of the Infinispan 9 series.

We plan to do many exciting things in Infinispan 9.x, and this release is just one of many stepping-stones that will get us there. Here's what's included with Alpha1:

• Graceful clustered shutdown / restart with persistent state
• The REST cache store has a shiny new Netty-based backend, courtesy of Antoine Toulme
• and many, many bugfixes: consult our issue tracker for a list of things we have fixed. 

A new major release is also the moment to peform some "spring-cleaning" (pun intended):

• We've removed Spring 3.x support
• We've removed our home-brew map/reduce implementation. By now you should be using the wonderful Streams-based API instead which are much nicer and provide better performance
• We've dropped our custom NotifyingListeners in favour of Java's standard CompletableFuture

Don't forget to check-out our roadmap to see the schedule and the things we want to do

Download it now, try it and tell us what you think on the infinispan forums or come and meet us on IRC: channel #infinispan on Freenode.