Container Ready JVM - overview of the technologies and how to integrate them for serverless applications. Quarkus is a technology that uses JEE/Jakarta EE to deliver a runnable application. GraalVM using native takes the runnable application and compiles it natively to the host system. Using containers, like Docker, can show the benefits of the technologies when scaling.

1. Quarkus and GraalVM – Container Ready Java
Brian S Paskin, Senior Application Architect, R&D Services, IBM Cloud Innovations Lab
29 January 2020
WebSphere Liberty Lunch and Learn

2. What is a Quark?
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3. Introduction
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 Quarkus is an open source project by Red Hat
 A native Java stack for Kubernetes
 Serverless implementation
 Uses standard implementations from Java EE/Jakarta EE plus other extensions
– Does not implement all standards and implements partial standards
 Small footprint
 Uses less memory
 Fast startup time, especially in Native mode
 Unified configuration file
 Hot code reloading for developers

4. Introduction
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 GraalVM is an open source project from Oracle
– Comes in two flavors, Community Edition and Enterprise Edition
 Polyglot virtual machine that supports Java, JavaScript, Python, C/C++, plus others
 Can be used to compile native images, binary file that runs on target machine
– native-image update is downloaded separately
– Runs on a “Substrate VM” that contains runtime components
 Uses Ahead of Time (AoT) compilation for native images to start and run faster
– Moves runtime features to build time, like annotation scanning and proxy creation
 Built using OpenJDK as its base

5. Why use these technologies
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 Made for containers
– Small native image size compared to application servers
– Start container images in a small amount of time compared to full application servers
– Uses less memory than straight Java application or those in application servers
 Speed of startup
– Containers usually do not have changes
– Slower to compile native images, but much faster when starting
– Magnitude of times faster than using an application server
– No Bootstrap classes
– No dynamic proxies, or manually added proxies
– No reflection, or manual added reflection
 Ease of use
– Java 8 and Java 11 are supported
– Live reloading for developers
– Unified configuration file
– Easy to create native image

6. Speed and Memory
6 Taken from Quarkus homepage https://quarkus.io on 30/01/2020

7. Some negatives
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 Startup speed does not equal processing speed
 Does not currently implement all enterprise technologies
 Not all parts of Java are supported in AoT.
 Need to be aware the compatibilities between Quarkus and GraalVM
 Importing other third-party libraries may not take advantage of benefits or may have issues
with native image compilation
 May be harder to debug issues

8. Demo
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 Compile into a runnable jar
 Execute runnable jar
 Compile into native executable
 Run executable
 Create container and test
 Create Liberty container with code
 Run Liberty container
 Compare differences
Download code and files

9. More information
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 Quarkus
 GraalVM
 Code sample on GitHub