Enterprises recognize that cloud adoption comes with two major advantages: Reduced I/T costs and increased agility.
By agility, I mean the ability to deliver app functionality faster and handle more frequent changes.
Together, these free up resources that can be put towards more innovation.
But many organizations have made huge investments in Java code and skills.
They want to make sure those resources continue to pay off in a cloud environment.
Unfortunately, a lift-and-shift alone won't deliver the performance and agility benefits that come with the cloud.
Your Java app needs to become cloud-native.
So how do you get there?
Key to unlocking the benefits of cloud technology is how you deliver your applications.
You need to take a holistic approach to the DevOps lifecycle.
Otherwise you risk your delivery approach becoming the bottleneck to agility.
Let's take a quick look at the DevOps lifecycle in a cloud-native environment.
The lifecycle defines eight phases.
It starts with the Plan phase.
Next, the dev related phases: Code, Build and Test, followed by the ops phases: Deploy, Operate and Monitor.
The Plan or Release phases aren't specific to Java, though the other six are, so let's take a closer look at these.
To make things more concrete, I'll illustrate the points through Open Liberty.
It's a Java runtime designed for modern cloud-native application delivery.
It's the upstream open source for WebSphere Liberty, just like Fedora is for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Okay, let me explain how DevOps agility applies to cloud adoption.
I view it through two viewpoints: The first is agility for Java development.
And the second is agility for operations.
In other words, for cloud adoption to succeed, your DevOps team needs to see the payoff and how it works.
First, let's turn our attention to the dev related phases: Code, Build and Test.
With traditional app development, you create a large application on a longer delivery cycle.
With cloud native, you typically have compartmentalized services, or microservices, that better lend themselves to container-based deployments.
These microservices deliver their functionality via APIs.
But there's some good news for Java developers writing these APIs.
A lot of core functionality is available from open source standards like MicroProfile.
For developers, this means less code to write.
MicroProfile handles routine stuff like fault tolerance, security, service API contracts, health and metrics.
Sticking to standards also saves you coding time and keeps you from being locked into a single-vendor implementation.
Speaking of saving time, if you want developer buy-in, meet them where they work -- namely, their IDE of choice and their favorite tools.
That's why Liberty Tools provides plugins for Eclipse, IntelliJ, and Visual Studio.
They include a feature that Java developers are going to love: DevMode.
With DevMode, your code or config changes take effect immediately -- without a rebuild, redeploy or restart.
DevMode also handles local container deployments, closely matching your production environment.
The same approach to extending IDEs goes for Liberty's integrated build tools.
I'll talk about more of that in just a second.
Running short on time?
I get it. So let me net it out for you:
In the second half of this video, I cover Liberty's performance features, which includes a must-see runtime feature called InstantOn.
If you're too busy heads down coding, be sure to bookmark the links below.
Now let's look at the ops phases: Deploy, Operate and Monitor.
With traditional operations, most teams deploy applications less frequently,
use proprietary runtimes for clustering and high availability, and they follow manual steps.
No more.
With modern DevOps, automation is king.
Fortunately, containers and Kubernetes provides a standard platform approach for packaging, clustering and deployment.
The Liberty operator builds on this standard, providing simplified application deployment and management.
This greatly reduces the configuration skills required, speeding up adoption and your team's delivery times.
Of course, once your app is running, you need to monitor it.
That means capturing logs, metrics, tracing and health checks.
Liberty provides comprehensive monitoring support, including support from popular log aggregators.
And through MicroProfile, Liberty provides built-in metrics instrumentation, distributed tracing and health checks.
Okay, up to this point, I've covered how Open Liberty helps your team deliver new functionality faster and handle more frequent changes.
But there are several payoffs that help both.
Topping the list is minimal footprint.
In a cloud-native microservices world, you can be running hundreds of applications.
That sheer volume has the potential to slow down your operations.
But Liberty lightens the load by adopting "only what you need" attitude.
If you just need a servlet, you only get a servlet.
You just need MicroProfile.
No problem -- you only package MicroProfile.
The net result?
You don't waste resources on code that's not needed.
But that's not the end of the story.
To be light on actual memory usage,
Liberty can offload memory-intensive JIT compilation to a separate server, reducing the overall usage across multiple applications.
Another cost factor is performance.
As a normal course of business, deployments are expected to service thousands of requests.
You need low memory and high throughput under load, not just for the first request.
Liberty has leading throughput performance and it scales well as the volume of concurrent clients increases.
That helps you keep your cost down.
Finally, rounding out the "get it done fast" list is serverless.
Serverless takes away the pain of managing infrastructure.
Just bring your app and requirements and it runs it for you.
This allows you to scale up or down quickly, including from nothing.
Of course, to scale up quickly, you need your app to start and respond fast.
That's why the new Liberty InstantOn feature enables you to take a snapshot of a running instance during build
and quickly restore the instance in production.
This leads to initial response time in the low hundreds of milliseconds.
And because it's a snapshot of a normal Liberty runtime, your dev and prod environments are the same.
To put it simply -- your apps just work.
To get more details, be sure to check out the links below.
Bottom line -- your company has relied on Java for years.
By adopting cloud-native Java following an agile DevOps lifecycle, you're well-positioned to carry that investment forward.
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