Java is still the pervasive development language among enterprise developers, even though it is not developers' preferred cloud-native runtime and is falling behind other languages, according to GitHub's Octoverse.
Because of Java and Enterprise Java's history, an application built on a traditional Java stack, even if it is optimized for cloud-native environments, requires more memory and takes longer to start than applications built on other popular languages. With modern platforms like Kubernetes, Istio, and Knative, the need to have smaller runtimes that can scale up, down, and even down to zero is becoming more and more important.