DEVOPSdigest

Azul announced the general availability of and commercial support for Azul Zulu Builds of OpenJDK for Java 17 including CRaC functionality.

Coordinated Restore at Checkpoint (CRaC) improves Java startup and warmup times. It is ideal for serverless functions, containers, microservices and other use cases.

Initiated in September 2021 as an OpenJDK project by one of the many Azul Java Champions as part of the company’s ongoing contribution to the Java community, CRaC allows a running application to pause, snapshot its state, and then restart later, even on a different machine. When performing a checkpoint, the full context of the application process is saved as an image, including its state and memory; upon restore, the entire application and its state is rapidly reloaded and continues from the same point where the checkpoint was created. This approach reduces Java application startup and warmup times by several orders of magnitude, i.e. milliseconds instead of seconds or even minutes.

“Improving startup and warmup times is a perennial concern for Java developers, and CRaC provides a powerful new approach for solving this challenge,” said Simon Ritter, Deputy CTO and Java Champion, Azul. “This produces a host of benefits. When serverless functions start faster, you pay less at scale. If your container takes less time to warm up, you need fewer instances to handle the same load from the beginning. When servers restart faster, you can perform more frequent updates to your application code and infrastructure. Taken together this means more efficient development and deployment of Java applications.”

With the April 2023 quarterly update release, Azul made commercially supported Azul Zulu Builds of OpenJDK featuring CRaC generally available for Java 17 on Linux x64 platforms. Azul Zulu with CRaC is now available for development, prototyping and production. Azul will be adding CRaC capabilities for additional Java versions in both Azul Zulu Builds of OpenJDK and Azul Platform Prime throughout 2023.