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.

Our Payara Engineers have been working very hard on lots of new features ready for our final 5.181 release! One of the key features we intend to deliver is compatibility with MicroProfile 1.2, which will include (among other things) a Fault Tolerance API.

In Payara Server 5 we will be introducing some major changes to the way clustering is working by creating the Domain Data Grid (see documentation for more info). The Domain Data Grid will be easier to use, more scalable, more flexible and ideally suited for cloud environments and cloud-native architectures. All Payara Server instances will join a single domain-wide data grid for sharing of in-memory data like web sessions, JCache, SSO and Stateful EJBs. 

As we are at the start of a New Year and it is traditional to gather your thoughts and put in place New Year resolutions and plans, I thought I would share with our Community and Customers the plans for Payara in 2018.

Both Payara Server and Payara Micro can cluster together and share data using Hazelcast. Out-of-the-box, there is no configuration needed, since Hazelcast uses multicast to discover and join other cluster members. However, when running in cloud environments like AWS, for example, there are a lot of things which can stop discovery being quite so straightforward. The key thing is that Multicast is not available, meaning another discovery strategy is needed; the most common generic alternative is to use TCP, but this assumes that you know at least the intended subnet that your cluster members will be in ahead of time.