Author: Dmitry Chuyko

This article covers a topic that may seem unusual, namely the Arm servers. For most developers, Arm is a dark horse in the world of server-class hardware dominated by Intel and AMD. But in truth, Arm servers have been around for a decade and are becoming increasingly popular thanks to their improved performance coupled with low maintenance costs. Let's look into their capabilities and see how your applications can benefit from migrating to this architecture.

This article follows my talk on JRush Episode 4, dedicated to modern Java development for banking and FinTech. 

Native Image technology is gaining traction among developers whose primary goal is to accelerate startup time of applications. In this article, we will learn how to turn Java applications into native images and then containerize them for further deployment in the cloud. We will use:

• Spring Boot 3.0 with baked-in support for Native Image as the framework for our Java application;

Do you still write lengthy Dockerfiles describing every step necessary to build a container image? Then, buildpacks come to your rescue! Developers simply feed them an application, buildpacks do their magic, and turn it into a fully functional container ready to be deployed on any cloud.

But how exactly does the magic happen? And what should you do if the resulting container performance doesn’t meet the business requirements? 

Spring Boot 3 is riding the wave in the Java world: a few months have passed since the release, and the community has already started migrating to the new version. The usage of parent pom 3.0.2 is approaching 500 on Maven Central!

An exciting new feature of Spring Boot is the baked-in support from GraalVM Native Image. We have been waiting for this moment for years. The time to migrate our projects to Native Image is now!

Linux containers are a powerful solution for:

• Software standardization
• Acceleration of development and testing
• Effective resource management throughout the whole lifecycle of an application

Here, we will provide a step-by-step guide to building Linux containers with applications intended for Cloud deployment. As an example, we will use BellSoft’s open-source Alpaquita Stream containers hosted on the Docker Hub Container Image Library.

Gartner estimated that end-user spending on public cloud services would grow 20.4% in 2022 to a total of $494.7 billion. That is up from $410.9 billion in 2021. In 2023, end-user spending is expected to reach nearly $600 billion. 

Interestingly enough, cloud computing, one of the major buzzwords in the last decade, has not yet been established as a term in the Oxford dictionary. 

The best practices of modern development, especially when implementing a microservices architecture, involve the use of Docker, Kubernetes, and other container technologies. 

Containers are transforming how enterprises deploy and use applications. The main biggest draws of containers as such are increased efficiency and portability. Сontainers allow running software without worrying about operating systems or dependencies.  So, the container simplifies your software architecture, allowing you to skip building a production environment with the right settings and libraries, as the container already has that built-in.