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. 

There is a lot of interest in the server-side Java community around using ahead of time (AOT) native compilation provided by Graal Substrate VM to drive down memory usage and cold start times of Java microservices. While these frameworks are technically interesting, the claim is if you spend time rewriting your Jakarta EE applications to utilise these new frameworks, then you will substantially reduce your cloud operational costs. First, by enabling the adoption of a serverless deployment model and second by reducing your containers' memory usage. 

Writing microservices within Jakarta EE is technically possible, but you miss a few goodies for the distributed environment you are running in.

MicroProfile wants to optimize your Enterprise Java application by creating Java standards which link to some well known CloudNative standards like etcd for Configuration, OpenTracing and Jaeger for Distributed Tracing and Prometheus for Metrics.

In this talk, delivered by Payara's Rudy De Busscher at EclipseCon, he goes over some basic concepts of the MicroProfile specifications and show you through various demos how the integration with those tools can be done easily.

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.

The Payara Server Community 5.2020.6 release introduces a host of new enhancements to Eclipse MicroProfile, with MicroProfile Config containing most of these improvements. MicroProfile Config now comes with five new config sources for cloud key vaults and databases. The Payara Health Check Service has also been updated to monitor any Metrics exposed in the MicroProfile Metric, and it can now expose any HealthCheck checkers to the MicroProfile Health REST endpoints.

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.

In this short video Rudy de Busscher demonstrates how to use MicroProfile OpenTracing with Jaeger in combination with Payara Micro.

In this short video Rudy de Busscher shows how to connect MicroProfile Metrics with Prometheus and Grafana to produce useful graphics and to help investigate your microservice architecture.

For some time now there has been an undeniable growth of interest for Microservices. The core concept itself, however, is not that new.

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?