Payara is pleased to announce that we have joined the MicroProfile Working Group. This builds on our commitment to shaping and improving Enterprise Java for both microservices and monolithic architectures. 

The MicroProfile project was born as a community initiative to optimise Enterprise Java with a microservices standard platform. It joined theEclipse Foundation in 2017, an independent open source software association, with the goal of driving innovation with a vendor-neutral "incubation" environment.

The Eclipse Foundation's MicroProfile Working Group encourages collaboration between participants, working in short cycles to propose and gain approval for new common APIs and functionality - and in turn drawing on the knowledge of a wide variety of different vendors. As one of the contributors, Payara engineers will shape and drive the future of the MicroProfile specifications.

We talked to our Founder and CEO Steve Millidge to find out more about what this means. 

What happens when an application designed for a small user base needs to be scaled up and moved to the cloud?

It needs to live in a distributed environment: responding to an appropriate number of concurrent user requests per second and ensuring users find the application reliable. 

Though Jakarta EE and Eclipse MicroProfile can help with reliable clustering, there is no standard API in Jakarta EE that defines how clustering should work currently. This might change in the future, but in the meantime, this gap must be filled by DevOps engineers.

In this blog, we will cover 10 technical strategies to deal with clustering challenges when developing Jakarta EE and MicroProfile for cloud environments.

All companies are software companies, and businesses will always experience the challenge of keeping integrations between users and applications scalable, productive, fast, and of high quality. To combat this, cloud, microservices, and other modern solutions come up more and more in architectural decisions.

Here is the question: Is Java prepared to deal with these diverse concepts in a corporate environment?

Yes, and to demonstrate how Jakarta EE and Eclipse MicroProfile work very well and in the cloud, the Payara and Platform.sh will work together on this webinar. Watch and make your conclusions.

At Payara Services, we have long been advocates of the benefits of using DevOps practices not only in the development of our products (like Payara Server & Payara Micro), but also in the core of our expert advice to our user base with our blog containing arguments for using DevOps practices, details of DevOps tools and new developments that benefit it.

One of our key goals for the Payara Platform is to enable developers to use the Java EE skills they have honed over many years to take advantage of new infrastructure, architectures and programming models. We fundamentally believe that a managed runtime platform combined with industry standard APIs like Java EE and in the future Jakarta EE is a perfect fit for cloud and containerized infrastructure. Java EE has always separated the development of applications from the construction and management of the infrastructure to run those applications using the concept of deployment artifacts. This has a natural fit to cloud and container platforms including in the future serverless models.

It may be hard to believe in 2018, but there was once a time before Amazon Web Services. In 2006, Amazon launched what was to become the most dominant platform in cloud computing - the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). While there were a lot of early adopters who could see the benefits of "Infrastructure as a Service" (IaaS) style cloud computing - a notable example being Dropbox - there were many who were sceptical of the hype around the "cloud" and prompted stickers like the one pictured.

As part of release 4.1.2.173, new notifier integrations were developed for Payara Server for the New Relic and DataDog application performance monitoring (APM) services. Both services allow the gathering of JVM statistics, HTTP metrics and support the use of notification for critical events in the server lifecycle management. In this era of cloud services, performance monitoring is an integral part of the IT infrastructure for any organization, which is the reason integration with these services has been brought to Payara Server. This article will show how to correctly set up these notifiers to that purpose.

First quarter of 2018 will bring with it our long-awaited Payara 5, fresh out of Beta. Scheduled for a Q1 release (download the Release Candidate here), Payara 5 brings with it a host of improvements to Payara Server and Payara Micro. Bringing long-awaited upgrades to a raft of APIs, as well as a rethinking of the cluster concept, Payara 5 also brings us up to date with Eclipse MicroProfile 1.2 and the core functionality of GlassFish 5.