How Support Customers Help Shape the Future of the Payara Platform

Originally published on 23 Oct 2018
Last updated on 23 Oct 2018

When support for the GlassFish application server ended, Payara Server entered the market as a fully supported, open source, drop-in replacement. Today, Payara Services is home to the growing Payara Platform and Commercial Support Services, including:

Payara Server – the best option for production Java EE applications.
Payara Micro – the best choice for running Java EE applications based on the Web API (WAR files) in a modern virtualized infrastructure.
Payara Enterprise Support - 10x5 or 24x7 support with security patches to meet data compliance requirements.
Payara Migration & Project Support - assistance during development projects before going to production, or with the application server migration process.
Payara Accelerator Consultancy - solutions customized to your specific needs to accelerate your business growth, your Payara Platform deployment or migration.

The Payara Platform is Open Source

Payara Services is devoted to open source – just as our support customers’ needs help shape the future of the Payara Platform, our dedicated team of professionals are helping to shape the future of the industry. We serve as Strategic Members of the Eclipse Foundation and members of the Project Management Committee and make direct contributions to Jakarta EE and Eclipse MicroProfile. Our involvement in the industry as a whole enables our team to guide changes to the industry based on the needs of our customers while providing continuous development and support of the Payara Platform.

The Payara Platform is aggressively compatible with the services you’re already using including Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Eclipse MicroProfile, among others - and is positioned for future compliance to Jakarta EE. As our customers require integrations with new services, the community and our engineers work to make the Payara Platform compatible.

Customers Drive the Evolution of the Payara Platform

As an organization fully committed to open source, the Payara Community allows users to submit ideas, feedback, and collaboration for the development of the Payara Platform. Our Enterprise customers participate in customer advisory calls with our global support engineers to share their experiences with the Payara Platform and request new features and capabilities.

In addition to providing hot fixes for urgent solutions our customers require for Payara Server running in production when support customers submit tickets for help with their use of the Payara Platform, we take note of any new feature requests and add them to our developer’s to-do list. As we create new capabilities and features of the Payara Platform, we roll them out to our customers on the Features Stream, along with monthly releases, bug fixes, and patches. If your key priority is stability rather than new features, however, customers can choose the Stability Stream to receive bug and security fixes with a single feature set for 12 months. Also, our 10-year support lifecycle means you won’t have to worry about upgrading a year or two after you implement your Payara solution.

Examples of Payara Platform Features Created From Customer Requests

Here are just a few examples of new features and capabilities that were created because our customers requested them:

Environment variable replacement - suitable for creating a single Docker container that can be configured with environment variables for various environments.
Support for running configuration commands after server startup - suitable in Docker and cloud environments when configuration needs to be dynamically adapted to the current environment.
MicroProfile Fault Tolerance 1.1 - metrics for execution of fault tolerance actions requested by a customer, which made collaborating on this in the MicroProfile project and implementing it in Payara Platform a high priority.
Metrics integration for MicroProfile - Internal Payara Platform monitoring information exposed via MicroProfile vendor metrics.
Added support for internal monitoring in Payara Micro - exposed via MicroProfile Metrics REST service.
Extensions for MicroProfile Metrics - integration into other services of Payara Platform, including secure and role-based access to the metrics using a security realm.
Reduction of memory footprint in our official Docker images - so that they consume less resources in a customer's cloud environment to save costs and increase the stability of their Docker containers.