By James Falkner, technical product manager, Red Hat

The application development landscape is continuing to shift. As best practices continue to move to the cloud, it is important that developers are equipped with the technologies and tools needed to make the most out of cloud-native and modern applications. Over the past year, Red Hat has been focused on bringing Java and its millions of enterprise developers into the future of hybrid and cloud-native application development. To do this, Red Hat has introduced the Red Hat Build of Quarkus, the Kubernetes-native Java stack that allows Java developers to work within the tried-and-true language they already know, but within new, modern technologies like serverless and microservices.

Red Hat recently announced that Quarkus is a supported part of Red Hat Runtimes, which is a set of products, tools and components for developing and maintaining cloud-native applications. With Red Hat Runtimes, developers can choose the right tool for the job, as it offers lightweight runtimes and frameworks, such as Quarkus, for highly distributed cloud architectures. To ensure the best possible customer experience, the team at Red Hat is continuously making updates to Red Hat Runtimes. Check out some of the most recent ones.

Updates to Quarkus

While Quarkus is still a relatively new framework, it is quickly becoming an industry standard when it comes to modernizing Java, and developers are realizing the productivity and cost savings it can yield them. In fact, a recent IDC Lab Validation Survey found that when compared to another popular Java framework, Quarkus, when running in native mode, can achieve as much as 64% cost savings, and 37% cost savings when running in a Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Red Hat has recently introduced the Quarkus cloud native compilation feature, which will allow all users to run Quarkus in native mode, rather than in a traditional JVM. This will simplify the use of Quarkus,allowing all users to get maximum benefits. To achieve Quarkus native compilation, Red Hat is using the Mandrel Project, the downstream distribution of GraalVM, which was created to better support Red Hat customers while also remaining true to the upstream commitment. Mandrel is important for Quarkus, because it allows GraalVM to be bundled on top of OpenJDK 11. GraalVM is what allows Quarkus to be run in native mode, because of its native-image feature that produces native executable code, one of the key features that makes Java competitive in cloud-native workloads. By having Mandrel compatible with Quarkus, developers can use GraalVM to compile their Quarkus apps down to native binaries, to further optimize for the cloud and Kubernetes.

New Features in Red Hat Data Grid

An organization's data is the most important asset, and making that data consistently accessible to applications is critical to user experience and organizational success. Red Hat Data Grid provides a distributed, in-memory data grid that provides fast access to data for applications. By distributing data across multiple, geographically separated sites, applications and their users get immediate responses regardless of location. New in this release is the capability to distribute data across multiple OpenShift clusters, providing a consistent view to applications whether they are deployed on-premise, or across the hybrid cloud. The Data Grid Operator makes it easier to configure this cross-site replication, and can also dynamically scale the grid up and down, improving infrastructure utilization by matching application and data load demands.

Updates to OpenJDK

Continuing our commitment to modernizing Java and giving developers all the tools they need to successfully continue using Java, even with new technology tools, the latest update of Red Hat Runtimes also includes support for Java Flight Recorder in the Red Hat build of OpenJDK 8 (available in Red Hat Runtimes). The Java Flight Recorder is important because it allows developers and operations teams the ability to observe and produce reports for in-production Java applications. This combines the jobs of several other smaller utilities across the Java application landscape. In combination with Mission Control, Java Flight Recorder allows for the capture and reporting of a wide range of data, including garbage collection analysis, thread data, locks, networking and memory usage, making it a very useful tool for both developers and operations teams. This also helps with continuing to bring Java into the future of modern application development, as it helps to streamline multiple parts of the development process.

To learn more about the latest Red Hat Runtimes updates, visit the Red Hat Blog.

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About the Author

James Falkner is a technology evangelist, teacher, learner, author and dedicated to open source and open computing. He works at Red Hat as a technical marketing director for Red Hat's cloud native application runtimes and loves learning from others, and occasionally teaching at conferences. He's been doing this for the last two decades, and is a Computer Engineering graduate of the University of Florida.