Kubernetes is a topic that is frequently discussed in the development community, especially as the IT landscape increasingly shifts towards cloud and microservices. However, it’s crucial to evaluate whether it is genuinely indispensable for your environment or just another case of the next 'new and shiny' object capturing attention without substantial benefits. In this blog, we’ll delve into the reasons why Kubernetes might sometimes fall victim to the hype and explore whether it is the right fit for all scenarios. 

Payara Cloud provides an easy-to-use user interface to allow your application to run in a managed cloud environment. While this is very convenient for configuration and troubleshooting work, integration in continuous deployment pipelines calls for something else. Our answer is deploying to Payara Cloud using a GitHub Action Workflow and Payara Cloud Command Line (PCL). 

The runtime image of Payara Server consists of over 400 modules. Half of these do not come directly from the Payara codebase, but are various third-party APIs, their implementations and helper libraries. How do you choose the correct versions of your application's libraries so they are not in conflict with the ones in the server runtime?

Payara Micro 5.201 adds two command line options that make preparation of container images easier, as well as enable class data sharing on HotSpot Java Virtual Machine.

One of the performance metrics that are frequently compared  by developers are startup times. Payara Server is designed to be manageable at runtime, with a central management server (DAS - domain administration server) and multiple instances, and as such is not optimized for extremely fast startup time. Payara Micro on the other hand, is optimized to run predefined workloads with a stable configuration at runtime, and is therefore a better fit for for comparing start up time metrics.

In this blog, let's take a look at how you can configure Payara Micro for fast startup time by utilizing the class data sharing feature of Eclipse OpenJ9.

Payara Platform 5.194 was released recently, and just like the previous release, it is a certified Jakarta EE implementation. The request for certification can be seen on Jakarta EE platform project issue tracker.

We are very happy to report that we've successfully passed all of nearly 50,000 test suites of Jakarta EE 8 TCK, and Payara Server 5.193.1 is Jakarta EE 8 Full Profile compatible!

(Guest blog)