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How Quarkus fits into the Red Hat Runtimes formula
Faster microservices runtimes are the center of the excitement around Quarkus. Hear what Red Hat's James Falkner thinks about the framework in this podcast with TheServerSide.com.
There are plenty of new features to talk about in the world of Red Hat Runtimes. When I recently had the chance to speak with James Falkner, technical product manager for Red Hat Runtimes, he zeroed in on the Quarkus framework, or more specifically, the Red Hat branded build of Quarkus.
So, what's Quarkus? It's a Java framework developed with cloud-native integration as its top priority. If there's a Kubernetes-based deployment target in an enterprise architecture, the microservices, containers and serverless applications will run faster and start up quicker with Quarkus when compared to an OpenJDK build that lacks the framework.
How the Quarkus framework changes the game
"Quarkus takes the design decisions made in early versions of Java and turns them on their head," Falkner said. When Java was first released in 1996, Java virtual machines (JVMs) were deployed on big iron where a virtual machine could easily be dedicated 4 GB of RAM or more. And JVM startup times weren't that important. Once a production server started, the JVM ran until it was time for its monthly scheduled maintenance. But today, that's not how to optimize deployments to Kubernetes-based systems, such as OpenShift.
Memory usage and startup speed are of greater priority. "If it takes 10 minutes to start up, that's going to be a problem, especially if you're looking at doing things like microservices or serverless," Falkner said.
Java microservices need not be slow
Certainly the "Java is slow" criticism is one that has dogged the platform community for a long time. The Quarkus framework promises to be a powerful weapon to battle against that largely unjustified criticism. "Quarkus makes Java relevant in the age of Kubernetes and containers, whereas before it was dismissed as being too heavyweight," Falkner said.
The Quarkus framework wasn't the only topic of discussion.
The podcast also features Falkner's insights on Open Liberty, JBoss EAP licensing and the role of Apache Tomcat and JBoss Undertow in the world of Red Hat Runtimes.
What is Red Hat up to in the middle tier? Listen to the podcast for more insight and opinions.