Red Hat Brings Cloud Native Services to Every Java Workload

The Evolution of Java

In today’s fast-paced technology world, nothing survives if it’s not evolving. This is particularly true for Java, the undisputed leader in development languages. While thousands of companies rely on Java EE to power their most mission-critical applications, the frameworks and patterns that Java developers are using today are rapidly evolving.

To be successful, Java developers need access to not only the broadest range of technologies, they also need to be able to run them on efficiently on modern, multi-cloud platforms.

To help Java developers manage the transition, Red Hat is happy to announce the availability of a Java container image for cloud native workloads. Red Hat now expands the availability of cloud native packaging models to all Java applications that rely on OpenJDK and Maven. This builds on the proven S2I technology that has been available for OpenShift applications for many years.

Combined Power

Over the last few years we’ve seen strong growth of microservices and single purpose java applications that benefit from a specialized packaging model. Technologies such as Vert.x, Spring Boot and Wildfly Swarm have grown so much in popularity that they are now associated with such types of workloads.

When you combine that with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, enterprise-ready Kubernetes, you achieve the nirvana of cloud native: Packaging technology born in the cloud native era and a deployment and orchestration model built for cloud scalability and resilience.

By using OpenShift S2I (source-to-image) and docker, developers will only need to worry about writing their applications. OpenShift S2I will take care of compiling, building and assembling the final runnable artifact which will be a docker image. Then the OpenShift Container Platform will run the application in a highly scalable manner, leveraging Kubernetes.

Uber-jar deployments

Earlier this week Red Hat also announced several enhancements to our application integration solution, especially for container-based workloads. Red Hat Fuse Integration Services (FIS) uses Spring Boot as one of the packaging technologies, together with OpenShift S2I and also the docker image format.

With the release of the Java S2I, Red Hat and OpenShift users will be able to build and run fat-jar applications using the full suite of Red Hat application services on OpenShift Container Platform.

Red Hat will soon offer a supported, embedded Apache Tomcat runtime library to all JBoss Web Server and OpenShift customers. Any application that embeds Apache Tomcat, such as those developed with Spring Boot, benefit from a supported embedded Apache Tomcat runtime.

The Java S2I container image uses the docker image packaging format and includes OpenJDK 8. It is available on OpenShift Online Developer Preview and you can see more details about in the Red Hat Container Catalog and by following the links below.

How to get started

Red Hat Container Catalog - Get the Image

Red Hat Developers Blog - How to use the Java S2I Image

Red Hat - Product Documentation

We understand that a platform is only as important as the applications and the business enabled by such platform. The availability of a container image for Java cloud native workloads reinforces our understanding and shows our commitment to our customers and extended community.