DEVOPSdigest

Azul introduced its Java Performance Engineering Lab, which collaborates with global Java developers and customers’ technical teams to deliver enhanced Java performance through continuous benchmarking, code modernization recommendations and in-depth analysis of performance impacts from new OpenJDK releases.

Azul’s Java Performance Engineering Lab was built to focus on optimizations for Azul Platform Prime. The lab works with Java developers globally as well as customers’ architects, developers, and site reliability and performance engineering teams to introduce optimizations that improve Java speed and performance. Azul’s performance engineers also make client recommendations on how to modernize their own application code which can result in even further performance gains.

Azul’s engineers continually test the code speed of Azul Platform Prime compared to other OpenJDK distributions using accepted industry standard benchmarks such as Renaissance, DaCapo and SpecJBB, as well as benchmarks for popular Java-based Apache projects like Kafka, Cassandra and Solr. Each LTS release, and updated versions of those LTS releases, typically impact Java performance. Azul continuously assesses the performance of a wide range of Java releases to improve performance and operational efficiency.

Azul’s Java Performance Engineering Lab also evaluates emerging technologies including:

- New hardware capabilities (e.g. LAM in Intel).

- Updates of CPU architectures (e.g. AWS Graviton 4).

- Latest Linux kernel features, performance tooling.

- Java evolution (e.g. CRaC, Virtual threads, Project Valhalla, Project Leyden).

- Optimizations developed and contributed to the LLVM compiler community.