The Spring team announced a new experimental Spring Native project in the fall of 2020, which gave Spring developers hope for faster startup times. Converting your Spring apps to native executables is what Spring Native is all about, and it does this by using GraalVM. This was a huge announcement because the new kids on the block, Micronaut, and Quarkus, created native executables by default.
When I first heard about Spring Native, I was quite excited. Despite its initial release (v0.8.3) on November 23, 2020, I began using it in September 2020, likely due to SpringOne. How do I know for sure? Because that's when I tried it for the first time and reported an error for the Okta Spring Boot starter. In the waning weeks of 2020, I was able to get things functioning with Spring Security's OAuth dependencies (rather than the Okta starter).