With Azul chief Scott Sellars commenting on Java pricing issues for Forbes.com already this year, organisations might wonder what Azul offers as an alternative.
As reported on Weirdware, Oracle pricing and licensing changes around Java could spur about 72% of customers to jump ship, based on figures from Azul’s State of Java survey for 2023. Yet with Java remaining integral to many cloud infrastructures, they may need an OpenJDK alternative or similar.
About 82% indicated concern about the January 2023 shift to Java SE Universal subscription pricing, with Oracle licensing and policy changing every year for four years in a row. Additionally, the latest change moved pricing from by processor to by user.
Azul’s counter-offer for disgruntled Oracle Java customers centres on Azul Platform Prime. As Azul CEO Sellars has said, high-performance Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) can be “pivotal” in meeting application service levels and optimising cloud costs – with the cloud over-provisioning and rising cloud costs often cited as major concerns.
Azul proffers various case studies on its website showing how different customers have used Azul Platfomr Prime to help solve these kinds of challenges.
In one, e-tailer focused platform Bazaarvoice discusses how Azul Platform Prime helped it reduce the amount of infrastructure needed to support cloud applications like Cassandra and Elasticsearch as well as response times for those applications.
This also meant developers could focus solely on developing new features, instead of having to continuously performance-tune the infrastructure.
Cody Bayer, devops engineer at Bazaarvoice, was quoted as saying that “without Azul Platform Prime, we would be running five times more infrastructure”.
“Azul has allowed us to focus only on our applications. We don’t have to worry about performance,” Bayer said.
At Mastercard, senior technical consultant Ted Boehm noted that the credit card company typically needs to identify fraud and clear transactions “tens of thousands” of times per second.
With Azul Platform Prime, Mastercard went from nearly 10,000 full “garbage collection” pauses a day to almost none, enabling much flatter, more consistent performance even while decisions are based on real-time risk analytics, the company said.
The Azul website claims the vendor can offer Java runtimes that use up to 50% less infrastructure.
( Photo by justin bhalla on Unsplash )
