As we approach the end of 2023, it’s time to pause and reflect on the incredible past twelve months we had as a team at BellSoft. This year was filled with overcoming challenges, seizing opportunities, taking part in fruitful engagements, and participating in unforgettable events.
In response to the growing trend of containerization, we strive to provide the developers with a wide range of ready-to-use secure and performant container images for Java development and deployment. I’m proud to say that our efforts have yielded excellent results. Throughout the year, Liberica JDK container images were downloaded an impressive 8 million times!
Apart from containers, we aim to provide our customers with the most complete Java experience based on a broad selection of solutions for Java development and deployment. And as a result, the range of our customers doubled this year!
Our offerings encompass images for various Linux distributions, including Alpine Linux, Debian, and CentOS. Additionally, we provide enhanced container images with our bespoke Linux distribution — Alpaquita, a perfect alternative to Alpine, specifically designed for enterprise use. Developed and supported by the BellSoft engineers, Alpaquita celebrated its first anniversary in 2023, and it is at the core of our brand-new product — Alpaquita Containers.
Introducing Alpaquita Containers
Alpaquita Containers seamlessly combine the power of Alpaquita and Liberica JDK Lite, specially tailored for cloud deployments to reduce memory footprint. Alpaquita Containers were designed with efficiency in mind, so their images take up only about 40 MB. As such, our containers significantly contribute to minimizing RAM consumption by up to 30%! This underscores our commitment to providing resource-efficient solutions for modern cloud deployments.
But that’s not all! This year, we’ve expanded our product family with two additional solutions. These new additionals further demonstrate our dedication to offering a diverse range of cutting-edge products that cater the evolving needs of our users.
Performance Edition Line
This year marked the launch of the Performance Edition line with the release of Liberica JDK 11 Performance Edition. It couples JDK 11 with JVM 17, bringing the performance of Java version 17 to JDK 11-based projects. This new solution empowers enterprises to upgrade their Java version at their own pace and boost the performance of their code with minimal to no adjustments.
The overwhelming interest in Liberica JDK Performance Edition has been truly inspiring. Building on this momentum, I’m pleased to share our intention to further enrich the Performance Edition line with additional offerings in 2024.
Liberica JDK with CRaC
To support our partner Spring with their latest release of Spring Boot, which features baked-in support for the CRaC API, we introduced a new flavor to our flagship product — Liberica JDK with CRaC.
The Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint (CRaC) API enables the developers to pause a running application and restore it later from the moment it was paused, thus achieving almost instant startup and warmup at peak performance.
With Liberica JDK being the default Java runtime for the Spring Framework, we are excited to provide the Spring Boot developers with an opportunity to seamlessly integrate this innovative technology into their projects.
Ongoing Commitment to OpenJDK and GraalVM
In the past year ,we proudly delivered:
- four quarterly releases, each came with security patches and critical fixes, Notably, BellSoft is one of only three companies that provide both PSU and stabilized CPU builds.
- one feature release of Liberica JDK 20, and
- one LTS release of Liberica JDK 21.
Our engineers have been actively involved in the OpenJDK community, contributing a total of 52 fixes and patches across all OpenJDK CPU releases.
In addition, we took an active role in developing ParallelGC for GraalVM Community Edition. The new garbage collector implementation demonstrates promising results, with GC pause reduction ranging from 10-40%. ParallelGC is currently being integrated into Liberica NIK, and we hope that it will become a part of the GraalVM project.
BellSoft’s Vibrant Engagement with Java Community in 2023
Our dialog with the Java community has been vibrant and dynamic throughout the year. Our Performance Architect, Dmitry Chuyko, has been a standout ambassador for BellSoft, delivering 30 talks at 28 global events this year. At JNation and Devoxx Belgium, Dmitry delivered two presentations, showcasing our dedication to sharing knowledge and insights with the wider Java community.
Dmitry Chuyko at Devoxx Belgium 2023
Moreover, this year marks a significant milestone for the Java community: the 25th anniversary of the Java Community Process, a robust framework for the collective development of the Java platform. BellSoft, as a member of the JCP Executive Committee, was honored to be invited to the celebration held in New York. Dmitry and I were delighted to attend this milestone event in person and reconnect with other members of JCP.
The JCP meeting in New York
Also, we hosted the fourth episode of JRush, our web conference for Java developers. This particular episode, dedicated to modern Java development for banking and fintech, featured three experts sharing their expertise and valuable insights on building reliable and performant cloud-native Java applications. For those interested, the episode is available for free on our YouTube channel.
Furthermore, our commitment to knowledge sharing extends to our blog, where we enriched the Java knowledge with 65 articles this year.
Looking Ahead to 2024!
As we conclude this remarkable year, I would like to extend my gratitude towards our customers, partners, developers, and the entire OpenJDK community. Your trust and collaboration have been the main reason for our success. Together, let’s ride full-speed into 2024, continuing to create a better future through technology for everyone! Our journey is just beginning, and I’m excited for the innovations and milestones that lie ahead.
