devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Mike Vizard

  • Microservices Momentum Accelerates

    Microservices Momentum Accelerates

    A global survey of 353 application development professionals conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of LightStep, a provider of application performance management (APM) tools, finds a full 86 percent of respondents expect microservices to be the default architecture within five years.

    A total of 60 percent of respondents said they already have microservices in production or deployed as part of a pilot, and 92 percent said they expect to grow their use in the coming year.

    Top reasons cited for employing microservices are agility (82 percent) and scalability (78 percent).

    The downside of increased reliance of microservices is the need to manage them all. The survey finds 99 percent report challenges in using them. More than half (56 percent) reported that each additional microservice increases operational challenges, and 87 percent of those that have deployed microservices in a production environment reported they are generating more application data.

    To make matters more challenging, a full 98 percent of respondents said they have trouble identifying the root cause of performance issues associated with microservices. More than three-quarters (76 percent) said it also takes longer to resolve issues. In fact, 73 percent said it is more difficult to troubleshoot application performance problems compared to a traditional monolithic application.

    Not surprisingly, just less than three-quarters (74 percent) said they plan to increase investments in microservice performance management tools in the next year.

    LightStep CEO Ben Sigelman said that while microservices come in many forms, advances in how software is developed is clearly coming at a cost. Not only is software becoming more challenging to manage, APM tools are now a prerequisite. Historically, IT organizations only monitored their most mission-critical applications. But the level of dependency each microservice has on others requires a more holistic approach to APM, Sigelman said, noting that IT teams now need to be able to see well beyond the border of any one microservice.

    Challenges associated with managing microservices are not likely to deter organizations from eventually adopting them. The level of agility and resilience inherently built into in a microservices-based application are too high to ignore. But the rate at which they are employed might be impacted. There’s usually a direct relationship between the availability of tooling and expertise and the rate at which any emerging technology gets deployed in a production environment. The good news is advances in machine learning algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) should make it easier to manage microservices in the years ahead.

    In the meantime, IT organizations can take some comfort in the fact that developers are being held more accountable for the microservices they build. That level of accountability tends to vary widely by organization. But the end result is generally higher levels of software quality because developers increasingly realize they can’t throw code over the proverbial IT operations wall without it coming back to them. The challenge now is to bridge the historic divide between developers and IT operations teams in a way that works best for everyone concerned.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Oracle Adds Low-Code Tool to Autonomous Platform

    Oracle Adds Low-Code Tool to Autonomous Platform

    Oracle this week extended the scope of the cloud services it manages on behalf of customers to include a low-code application development platform based on the company’s Visual Builder development tools.

    Jeff Price, vice president of product Management at Oracle, said Oracle Autonomous Visual Builder (VB) Cloud makes it possible to employ a tool based on JavaScript to build applications that might be written, for example, in Java or, going forward, Jakarta EE. Autonomous Visual Builder Cloud is available via a managed service that can easily integrated with a variety of back-end services managed by Oracle or running on-premises.

    To complement that effort, Oracle also announced the availability of Oracle Autonomous Analytics Cloud and Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud. Oracle Autonomous Visual Builder comes with tools for accessing back-end services, while Oracle Autonomous Integration Cloud provides a raft of additional connectors for accessing a wide variety of other Oracle and third-party services, Price said.

    Oracle also committed to delivering additional autonomous services later this year to address mobile and chatbots, data integration, blockchain, security and management and additional database workloads such as online transaction processing (OLTP). Those services will complement existing Oracle autonomous database and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments.

    Price said interest in low-code development tools is accelerating as organizations look to extend business processes that have been automated using either packaged applications running on-premises or in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. Rather than trying to achieve that goal using low-level application programming interfaces (APIs) that are fragile, Price said low-code tools such as Oracle VB make it simpler for even citizen developers to construct applications leveraging code developed by professional developers.

    Organizations need to decide for themselves when to customize those application environments versus taking advantage of them in a turnkey manner, Price said. Organizations tend to heavily customize customer experience and customer relationship management (CRM) applications, while relying on best practices that have been coded into enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Oracle is changing the way it supports those applications—base-level support for these applications is now free, but Oracle will continue to charge for premium services.

    The need to customize applications at scale is driving many more traditional enterprise IT organizations to adopt DevOps processes that now need to span multiple IT environments, Price said. He added Oracle now provides integration with multiple continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms to facilitate that transition.

    As Oracle assumes more responsibility for managing the underlying platforms, organizations in theory should be able to devote more resources to developing applications. To achieve that goal, however, many of them will need to figure out how to extend their DevOps processes to include Oracle as a managed service provider.

    Oracle also provides access to unmanaged infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and (PaaS) services in much the same way Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft do. Oracle has been late to the cloud game, but this week announced a slew of new cloud customers, including Atomitech Inc., Edith Cowan University, Future Robot, Barrick Gold Corporation, C’s NEXT, Colegio de Bachilleres, Contribute NV, DP World Ltd., Dubai Airport Freezone Authority, Emirates Flight Catering, Hytera Communications Ltd., Ildong Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Konyang University, Land O’Lakes Inc., Leshan City Commercial Bank, McDermott, MCore Group, New Hope Liuhe Co. Ltd., Promata, Stallion Oilfield, Ornua Co-Operative, RecVue, Saga d.o.o Beograd, TCI, TaskUs, University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics Authority, and Zeneral Heatpump Industry Co. Ltd. All told, Oracle claims to be processing 55 billion transactions a day on its cloud.

    It may take a while for Oracle to catch up to AWS. But if it doesn’t achieve that goal it won’t be for a lack of development tools.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Google Advances Confidential Computing

    Google Advances Confidential Computing

    Google has kicked off an effort to make it easier to build secure applications using an open source framework for confidential computing, which enables encrypted data to be processed inline by an application without ever requiring the data to be decrypted.

    Asylo is an open-source framework and SDK for developing applications that run in multiple instances of these trusted execution environments (TEEs), said Rob Sadowski, Google Cloud Trust and security marketing lead. TEEs are designed to prevent cyberattacks targeting operating systems, hypervisors, drivers and firmware.

    Asylo makes it possible for developers to build confidential computing applications that can be ported across multiple types of processors. Version 0.2 of Asylo will offer an SDK and tools to help developers create portable enclave applications. In the future, Google plans to provide the ability to run existing applications in a TEE using an Asylo container. Asylo will be compatible with the Kubernetes container orchestration engine and the Istio services mesh, which Google has played a leading role in developing.

    Multiple processors have extended their instruction sets to enable confidential computing, but developers have been required to master the nuances of each of those extensions. Each application also winds up being locked into those extensions. Google is working to ensure Asylo will be compatible with AMD Secure Encryption Virtualization (SEV) technology, Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) and other similar extensions to hardware platforms.

    Sadowski said an open source framework that makes it easier to build secure applications also represents a significant advancement for DevSecOps. Today, constructing confidential computing applications is simply too painstaking and time-consuming for most developers to master. A framework for building secure applications provides a high level of abstraction that is easier to master.

    Google is not recommending that every application going forward should include confidential computing functions. There are still significant application performance trade-offs to be considered. But there is an increasing number of applications in which data security issues will trump those performance concerns.

    Most developers don’t set out to build insecure applications. Arguably, IT vendors have simply made it too difficult. A framework that enables applications that run in TEEs to be built more easily is likely to be received well by developers and cybersecurity professionals alike, as cybercriminals are taking advantage of advanced vulnerability scanning tools to identify potential exploits up and down the entire computing stack, including unpatched operating systems and firmware.

    It’s too early to say how much mainstream adoption of confidential computing there will be. Most of its usage has been limited to government agencies and financial services organizations that have enough budget dollars to build, maintain and run these applications. Asylo should go a long way toward making TEEs more accessible to the average developer in a way that should lift much of the burden put on DevSecOps teams, who today struggle to secure data strewn across the extended enterprise.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Rackspace Aims to Push VMware Everywhere

    Rackspace Aims to Push VMware Everywhere

    Rackspace is expanding its efforts to provide managed services for private clouds based on VMware that can now be deployed anywhere.

    Peter FitzGibbon, vice president and general manager of VMware at Rackspace, said Rackspace Private Cloud Everywhere, powered by VMware, is making an effort to provide infrastructure services that enable IT organizations to devote more resources to building applications. As part of the effort, Rackspace is making the managed services it provides a natural extension of an organization’s DevOps processes.

    Previously, Rackspace provided support for VMware in data centers it owns. Now Rackspace will manage instances of VMware deployed anywhere, including public clouds such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), FitzGibbon said.

    FitzGibbon noted Rackspace already has more than 70,000 VMware virtual machines under management—a number the company expects to expand significantly as more instances of VMware are deployed on the cloud in addition to on-premises IT environments.

    Longer term, FitzGibbon said IT organizations should also expect to see Rackspace extend the reach of the managed services it provides for VMware to include storage and network virtualization, as well as Pivotal Container Service, an instance of a container platform developed jointly by Pivotal and its sister company VMware.

    FitzGibbon said most organizations are on a multiyear journey when it comes to making the transition to the cloud. Most are still analyzing which classes of workloads make the most sense to deploy on a public cloud. Also slowing that transition are new data sovereignty requirements that force organizations to rethink where data is hosted around the world, he said.

    As they make that transition, many of those organizations are concluding they don’t want to manage the underlying infrastructure that is now distributed across multiple data centers. Instead, they want to reallocate their own limited resources to developing software faster, FitzGibbon said.

    FitzGibbon also noted that taking advantage of advanced cloud capabilities such as cloud bursting or moving workloads back and forth between environments requires a level of expertise many organizations don’t have in place today.

    As more organizations realize they need to become software companies to remain competitive, many are rethinking how IT infrastructure is managed within the context of a integrated DevOps processes. As part of that transition, many are starting to evaluate how much of the management of IT infrastructure they can outsource within the context of those DevOps processes. Rackspace is essentially making the case for retraining the existing IT staff focused on IT infrastructure to focus more on managing applications rather than physical and virtual infrastructure.

    Naturally, that level of cultural IT transformation inside any organization will take time to achieve. Not every organization is comfortable giving up control over its IT infrastructure. Others will prefer to collaboratively manage IT infrastructure with a service provider. Just as significantly, not every member of the IT staff managing infrastructure wants to be retrained.

    Nevertheless, as the sheer volume of IT infrastructure that needs to be managed becomes more distributed, it’s unlikely most IT organizations will be able to manage all those systems on their own.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Google Looks to Simplify Building of Workflows

    Google Looks to Simplify Building of Workflows

    Google this week launched the beta of Cloud Composer, a managed Apache Airflow service for building workflows that promises to simplify management of integrated DevOps processes. Apache Airflow is an incubation project being developed under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation that enables IT teams to programmatically author, schedule and monitor workflows using directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) that visualize pipelines running in production, monitor their progress and can be used to troubleshoot issues.

    James Malone, a product manager for Google Cloud, said Cloud Composer leverages Apache Airflow to not only make it simpler to manage workflows, but also port them between various public and private clouds, including on-premises IT environments.

    Cloud Composer also includes the Google Developer Console and Cloud software development kit (SDK), a cloud identity-aware proxy, Stackdriver logging and monitoring, identity access management (IAM) and Python support, along with simplified DAG management and streamlined Airflow runtime.

    Google plans to add support for autoscaling and availability in additional Google Cloud regions over time, Malone said, as well as integrate Google Composer with Kubernetes to extend the reach of Apache Airflow workflows to containers.

    Pricing for Cloud Composer is consumption-based as measured by vCPU/hour, GB/month and GB transferred/month.

    Malone said Cloud Composer will play a critical role in enabling DevOps teams to construct pipelines spanning hybrid cloud computing environments. Today IT administrators regularly make use of text editors or scripts they write to automate a process. But it’s difficult for those scripts to be shared between multiple IT administrators. Cloud Composer and Apache Airflow make it easier to share workflows that automate processes across DevOps teams. Just as importantly, those workflows will be accessible to IT administrators who don’t have the programming skills required to develop a script.

    Those workflows will also play a critical role in unifying DevOps and DataOps processes around a common set of continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes, Malone added.

    Most organizations today are managing multiple clouds in isolation from one another. But as organizations look to build applications faster, they want to be able to deploy those applications on the most optimal platform available without having to develop a unique set of pipelines for each cloud environment. Having an application locked into a specific cloud platform not only is economically unacceptable, it’s also fundamentally inefficient from an application development and deployment perspective.

    Apache Airflow is not the only tool that can be employed to construct pipelines. But Malone noted that because it is an open source Apache project, organizations can be assured that workflows they develop can run anywhere now and into the future. Google chose Apache Airflow to build Cloud Composer largely because an active development community is emerging around this open source project, he said.

    The way IT platforms are managed is transforming rapidly. The days when servers and applications where managed in isolation are over. IT administrators are being asked to manage fleets of server and storage systems running more applications than ever. The tools required to achieve that goal are thankfully now becoming a lot more accessible to everyone in IT.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Dell EMC Bets on Machine Learning to Drive IT Agility

    Dell EMC Bets on Machine Learning to Drive IT Agility

    Dell Technologies announced it is infusing machine learning algorithms across its portfolio of server and storage infrastructure to optimize the performance of each individual application using artificial intelligence (AI).

    At the Dell Technologies World 2018 conference, the Dell EMC arm of Dell Technologies announced it has joined the Intel AI Builders program. Dell EMC and Intel will enable customers to benchmark Deep Learning and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads running on Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) integrated in the company’s PowerEdge R740 servers at the Dell EMC Innovation Lab and the Dell EMC customer Solution Centers.

    Dell EMC also unveiled Dell EMC PowerMax, an NVMe-based storage array that takes advantage of an embedded machine learning engine into the storage operating system to optimize I/O performance. Dell EMC said that engine is capable of making 6 billion decisions related to optimizing 40 million data sets a day.

    Finally, Dell also announced Dell Precision Optimizer software that compares the behavior of each application deployed on a Dell workstation against a machine learning model that automatically optimizes system settings. According to the company, Dell Precision Optimizer can improve workstation application performance band delivery up to 394 percent.

    Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, ‎president and general manager for server and infrastructure systems at Dell EMC, said the plan is make it possible to compare the state of an IT infrastructure deployment against AI models that Dell EMC is constructing in the cloud using all the data gathered from the company’s systems connected to Dell EMC support services. Armed with that data, it will become possible to optimize system settings for every type of application deployed on it, said Gorakhpurwalla.

    He noted that despite advances in DevOps, provisioning resources in a local data center on demand is still too time-consuming. Many IT organizations have adopted converged and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms to unify the management of compute, storage and networking. But machine learning algorithms combined with other emerging technologies should make it possible to make IT infrastructure resources on demand in a cloud-like manner. That increased level of automation should enable IT organizations to allocate more resources to developing applications than managing the infrastructure those applications run on.

    Each IT organization today is at a different stage of maturity when it comes to IT infrastructure. Dell EMC has one customer with a single administrator who manages more than 80,000 servers, Gorakhpurwalla said. Over time, IT infrastructure will become increasingly automated across a much broader range of customers, he noted—critical because it will allow local IT teams to be as agile as any cloud service providers. Today, many workloads are deployed in the cloud because of the perceived agility of the cloud, regardless of the actual costs.

    It may take some time for developers to regain confidence in the agility of local IT departments. But as AI models continue to evolve it’s now a matter of when rather than if local IT infrastructure will become much more responsive to the needs of any given application.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Cloud Foundry at the Crossroads

    Cloud Foundry at the Crossroads

    At the time the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment was constructed, the only form of infrastructure abstraction available consisted of virtual machines. Flash forward to today and there now exists multiple layers of abstraction, some of which potentially obviate the need for functionality built into Cloud Foundry.

    The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) is now in the middle of trying to navigate all those changes largely by committing to interoperability with technologies such as Kubernetes and the Open Container Initiative (OCI). Cloud Foundry developed its own container format (Garden) and associated container orchestration software (Diego). For now, the CFF is committed to continuing support for those technologies, while also providing interoperability with OCI, Kubernetes, the Container Network Interface (CNI) and Envoy, an open source service proxy, said CFF executive director Abby Kearns.

    CFF also took the lead on developing an Open Service Broker application programming interface (API) that is being rapidly embraced by both the Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes communities and is starting to evaluate additional open source projects such as Istio, a framework for load balancing microservices developed by member of the Kubernetes community.

    It’s already clear that all this interoperability is a first step toward tighter integration. After all, the amount of technical resources being poured into Kubernetes and OCI by consortiums such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and The Linux Foundation dwarfs anything CFF is likely to be able to match on its own.

    In fact, the real opportunity for CFF may be to establish Cloud Foundry as the platform that provides the best application experience there is on Kubernetes. Red Hat is has already staked out that ground by tightly integrating the Red Hat OpenShift PaaS with Kubernetes. The best CFF has been able to do so far is certify a distribution of Cloud Foundry created by SUSE that can be encapsulated in Docker containers.

    Naturally, it’s challenging to get a CFF consortium led by Pivotal Software, IBM, SAP and others to agree on strategic technology directions in a timely manner. Red Hat, for example, did not have to consult with anyone outside the company before deciding to integrate Red Hat OpenShift with Kubernetes. By now, however, it’s apparent that it’s no longer a question of whether Cloud Foundry will be integrated with Kubernetes, but to what degree. CFF last year created a Cloud Foundry Container Runtime environment on which IT organizations can deploy applications as an alternative to the native runtime.

    In the future it may be a lot more difficult to distinguish where the line between Cloud Foundry and other forms of abstraction begin and end—or, for that matter, what platform it will be deployed on. Kearns noted there’s already a bare-metal instance of Cloud Foundry, so there’s already a precedent of deploying it without hypervisors.

    Regardless what underlying technologies are employed, however, as long as developers enjoy the Cloud Foundry experience the chances are high the open source PaaS environment will be around the enterprise for many years to come.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Morpheus Data Extends DevOps Reach

    Morpheus Data Extends DevOps Reach

    Morpheus Data signaled it will pursue a more open strategy when it comes to enabling DevOps teams to manage multiple cloud platforms.

    Brad Parks, vice president of marketing and business development for Morpheus Data, said updates to the company’s namesake platform will make it possible for DevOps teams to swap in third-party modules and components even when Morpheus has already provided that equivalent functionality in the platform. This more open approach is being driven by a recognition that in many cases DevOps teams are being required to implement a specific corporate standard, Parks said.

    The latest edition of the Morpheus cloud management platform adds support for Kubernetes container orchestration software, Terraform configuration management software developed by HashiCorp and Microsoft Azure Resource Manager. Morpheus already has its own JSON/YAML scripting framework. But it’s clear more declarative approaches to managing cloud resources using, for example, Kubernetes or Terraform are starting to gain traction, Parks noted.

    At the same time, Morpheus is adding connectors to cloud services from Oracle and T-Systems.

    At its core, the Morpheus cloud management platform enables DevOps teams to consolidate analytics, reporting, governance, monitoring, logging and data protection within a single platform. Most organizations today either already are or expect to soon employ multiple clouds. Each of those clouds will be running different classes of workloads as IT organizations move to keep their cloud service provider options open. At the same time, Morpheus Data is betting that, rather than mastering separate management consoles for each cloud, organizations will move to centralize the management of multiple clouds as much as possible, Parks said.

    Parks noted Morpheus Data is also starting to see DevOps teams hooking up their preferred continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform to the Morpheus cloud platform. That approach provides them with a platform to manage applications starting the minute a CI/CD pipeline finishes pushing them into production, he said.

    CI/CD platforms and other DevOps tools are great when it comes to building and deploying applications, but currently a gap exists between how those applications are built and deployed versus managed when deployed in a production environment. Morpheus is designed to provide an open flexible approach to closing that gap, Parks said.

    Interest in various approaches to automating the management of IT is clearly on the rise. Most organizations simply don’t have enough IT staff to manage large numbers of applications being deployed at scale. In fact, Parks said Morpheus Data is seeing a marked rise in the number of managed service providers focused on DevOps and cloud management services.

    Regardless of how the integration of DevOps and cloud management is achieved, it’s clear IT processes are being transformed. The day when silos within IT organizations implemented various levels of IT automation based on various capabilities of platforms is starting to give way to a more comprehensive approach. The real challenge now is figuring out how to achieve that goal with the least amount of reasonable disruption to the culture of the IT organization as possible.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Puppet Expands Scope of Pervasive Automation Initiative

    Puppet Expands Scope of Pervasive Automation Initiative

    Puppet today unveiled a series of initiatives as part of a continuing campaign to make IT automation available pervasively across the enterprise.

    Omri Gazitt, chief product officer for Puppet, said the first step in that effort is making it easier for IT organizations to discover what assets they need to manage. Puppet Discovery is an agentless tool through which organizations can monitor their IT environments continuously. Any changes or additions are captured immediately in a database.

    Scheduled to be available in May, Puppet Discovery replaces a traditional configuration management database (CMDB) with a platform that more accurately reflects the state of the IT environment because it’s always up to date, Gazitt said.

    Puppet is also extending the reach of its IT automation framework to include modules spanning platforms from Barracuda Networks, Cisco Systems and Nutanix, as well as the Azure cloud service from Microsoft.

    Modules for Cisco ACI software-defined networks (SDNs) and Cisco Meraki wireless networks are now available, along with a private beta of a module for the Cisco IOS operating system widely employed on the Cisco network infrastructure.

    Similarly, Puppet modules are now available for security and data protection offerings from Barracuda Networks and the hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform developed by Nutanix.

    Puppet, in the context of the cloud, is now adding a module for Azure Resource Manager, as well as adding support for Windows PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) and the Microsoft Task Scheduler 2.0 application programming interface (API) used in Windows.

    In related news, Microsoft, Barracuda Networks and Puppet also announced they are combining their respective capabilities to create an Azure Accelerator program to automate and secure mission-critical workloads. Organizations that participate in the program can get started at no cost, with free software from Puppet and Barracuda and no Microsoft Azure infrastructure charges while migrating workloads to Azure Cloud.

    Other new members of the Puppet Technology Alliance Partner program include Lenovo and xMatters.

    Finally, Puppet announced scheduled June availability of Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise (PE), an update to Puppet Enterprise that includes role-based access control for Tasks, which can define node groups corresponding to business functions or units to limit who can run tasks within a specific node group. Puppet also has added Puppet Bolt Task Plans, which enable customers to orchestrate a set of tasks across thousands of Puppet Enterprise nodes using Puppet Orchestrator. Continuous Delivery for PE is based on a continuous delivery platform developed by Distelli that Puppet acquired last year.

    Puppet Enterprise has also been enhanced with easier backup and recovery capabilities to automate disaster recovery and support for a Puppet Development Kit (PDK), which includes a new resource application programming interface (API) that Gazitt said can be used to create custom Puppet modules to automate the management of any platform.

    In general, Gazitt noted that IT automation and DevOps increasingly are becoming synonymous. The biggest issue now, he said, is unifying all the independent silos of DevOps implementations that now span many enterprise organizations.

    Of course, IT organizations can apply IT automation without necessarily embracing DevOps. But once an organizations begins to adopt DevOps, it’s pretty clear IT automation quickly becomes indispensable.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Eclipse Foundation Charts Cloud-Native Path Forward for Jakarta

    Eclipse Foundation Charts Cloud-Native Path Forward for Jakarta

    A new era begins for the Java community today with a commitment to a Jakarta EE specification that the Eclipse Foundation expects will become cloud-native in short order.

    Jakarta EE formally marks the end of a Java era. While the term Java will still apply to any technologies developed prior to Oracle transferring stewardship of the venerable programming language to the Eclipse Foundation, all future innovations will be delivered under the Jakarta brand.

    A survey of 1,800 Java developers shows that in addition to increasing the overall pace of innovation, the top two priorities of the developer community is to see more emphasis being placed on microservices and integration with the emerging de facto Kubernetes container orchestration platform.

    A full 95 percent of the respondents building microservices said they are employing Java as part of those efforts, while nearly one-third of respondents are already working with Kubernetes. Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said that although it’s yet to be determined precisely how Java and Kubernetes will be more tightly coupled, it’s clear the Jakarta community wants to be able to deploy cloud-native applications based on Jakarta. Half of survey respondents said they ran only one-fifth of their Java applications today in a cloud. But more than 30 percent said they expect to be running 60 percent of more of their applications in the cloud within the next two years.

    Milinkovich said with Jakarta under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation, many more developers from different vendors will be contributing code to advance it. Previous advances to Java have been slow in coming over the years because all contributions to the code base were controlled by Oracle. One of the first things to change under the stewardship of the Eclipse Foundation, he noted, is that Oracle has committed to open-sourcing the Test Compatibility Kits (TCKs), which vendors previously were required to license at significant expense.

    Also expected to witness a faster innovation cycle, Milinkovich said, is Eclipse MicroProfile, a Java framework developed by IBM and Red Hat optimized for microservices, which the Eclipse Foundation expects to be as widely embraced as the Spring framework based on Java that Pivotal Software helped popularize. In fact, there will be a lot more cross-pollination of ideas and concepts across all the major frameworks from writing applications, he added.

    Tighter integration between Jakarta and Kubernetes and a general simplification of the effort required to develop microservices is likely to have a significant impact on DevOps for years to come. Many organizations today are contemplating the degree to which they may want to lift-and-shift existing Java application into the cloud versus rewriting them completely in a new language. With the Eclipse Foundation’s commitment to a cloud-native implementation of Jakarta EE, it’s clear that organizations can have greater confidence that existing investments in Java applications likely will remain relevant in the age of the cloud. In fact, the only decision left for many of them to make is the degree to which they might want to turn monolithic applications written in Java into highly portable microservices based on Jakarta EE.

    — Mike Vizard