It’s been 25 years since Java first made developers’ lives easier, promising cross-platform compatibility with its “write once, run anywhere” tagline. Thanks to its open-source roots, the language has evolved to keep up with the speed of innovation over those years, and it is still one of the most used programming languages worldwide.

But retaining relevance in 2020 and beyond means Java has to adapt to running in a containerized cloud environment.

“The focus of where we run Java and the kinds of applications we’re building with Java has radically changed, and as such the language has to change as well,” said Rich Sharples (pictured, right), senior director of applications services at Red Hat Inc.

Sharples and Miguel Perez Colino (pictured, left), principle product manager at Red Hat, spoke with Jeff Frick, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event. They discussed how Quarkus optimizes Java to run in serverless, cloud and Kubernetes environments. (* Disclosure below.)

Quarkus slims down Java for supersonic development speeds

Quarkus was developed “to ensure Java is a first-class citizen in containerized environments for building reactive applications, cloud native applications,” according to Sharples.

Containerized environments are marked by the reduced need for code, with limited life cycle microservices that are deployed as needed. This makes traditional Java loaded with unnecessary bulk and complexity. Quarkus optimizes the code and removes this dead weight.

“We can remove whole trees and class libraries and radically slim the memory footprint, increase the startup time as well, so you have less dead time in your applications,” Sharples said.

Cost savings of 64% and 90% reduction in start-up memory use are significant statistics, but Quarkus’ silver bullet is developer productivity, according to Sharples. “What we find is that most organizations come for the performance and the optimizations, but what they actually stay for is the speed of development,” he said.

Following a standard methodology and using Red Hat’s Migration Toolkit for Applications can help the process of migrating existing Java applications to the cloud, according to Perez Colino, who has created an impressive series of videos on the topic.

“You have to prepare the project by starting with a good assessment; you have to check which applications make more sense to start with and see how to group them together by similarities, and then you can start,” he said.

The Migration Toolkit for Applications is currently being updated to make it even easier to migrate Java applications to containers, according to Perez Colino. He promised a new version of the Migration Toolkit for Applications by December “that is going to include all the rules to help developers bring their Java code to Quarkus.”

Migration is going to grow in importance, according to Sharples, who predicted that next-generation microservices are going to be based around native, advancing, serverless functions.

“That’s really the ideal architecture for building market services on Kubernetes, and Quarkus plays really well there,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE