Small containers with Spring Boot applications save cloud resources and facilitate developers’ life as we found out in our previous article. Keeping that in mind, BellSoft engineers continue working on technologies that make Java containers faster, smaller, and safer.
Their endeavors resulted in Alpaquita Containers for the Spring Boot applications, which are now generally available for download.
The power of optimized Linux and Java under the hood
Alpaquita Containers are based on Alpaquita Linux and Liberica JDK Lite. Both technologies are aimed at improving the performance and decreasing memory footprint of Java applications.
Alpaquita Linux is a lightweight Linux distributions inspired by Alpine, but boasting multiple optimizations for enhanced security and flexibility, such as:
- Three libc variants (default musl, optimized musl, and glibc) and four mallocs;
- The base image size is only 3.28 MB (musl) and 8.76 MB (glibc);
- Kernel and userspace security hardening;
- LTS version for enterprise use.
Liberica JDK is the default Java runtime in Spring Boot. Liberica JDK Lite is the flavor optimized for cloud deployment, which delivers reduced static footprint thanks to better compression for modules and improvements backported from newer JDK versions. You can read more about Liberica JDK Lite features in the overview of Liberica JDK flavors.
Benefits of Alpaquita Containers
Here is what Alpaquita Containers help Spring Boot developers to achieve:
- Cost optimization. Smaller container images consume less cloud resources, thus leading to reduced cloud bills;
- Accelerated development. Small containers take less time to load, which is crucial in the case of numerous push/pulls or slow internet connection;
- Security. Both Linux and JDK receive regular updates keeping the free of known vulnerabilities. Support with 24/7 service and emergency patches is also available.
The performance studies comparing an image based on Alpaquita Linux and Liberica Lite vs the official OpenJDK image on Docker hub (which is not supported anymore but can be used for reference as an “average” OpenJDK implementation) showed the 30 % improvement in image size and RAM consumption associated with the Alpaquita image in comparison to the OpenJDK image.
Alpaquita container performance study
Try Alpaquita Containers now!
Alpaquita Containers are free to use — try them out with your application and let us know about the optimizations you managed to achieve! Head over to Alpaquita Containers page and explore the detailed guide on building the container and running the tests to measure its performance.
