Why GraalVM?

As I mentioned in the article about Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Horizontal Pod Autoscaling (HPA) Java services, and thus Spring Boot services as they are written in Java, are quite memory and CPU intensive when starting up. Java is designed to start up and stay up for a long time. It has excellent performance in runtime but in modern terms Java is poor when it comes to the startup aspect, in particular with Cloud measures, and this IS a problem that the community needs to address.

GraalVM together with its native image compiler may be the answer, or at least a great part of the answer, to that problem. The Spring Boot team, during the writing of this article, is working hard to deliver a super-simple way of enabling GraalVM and native image compilation to your already existing Spring Boot applications.

I can't promise you that GraalVM will be "it" in the end, maybe something else will win(?), but the approach as such seems inevitable if we are to be able to continue using Java as a programming language for all sorts of applications even in the Cloud.

This article will collect tips and knowledge provided by skilled people around the world, that are putting effort in exploring this area, and accompanied with that it will give a hands on demo, together with simple source code, on how to turn the pingpong-service into a native GraalVM image and run it on GCP (or some other platform of your choice).

Why Java and Spring Boot?

If Java sucks that much when it comes to starting up and if that makes it a less attractive Cloud candidate for some applications why not just abandon it for something better? - That's a reasonable question to ask given what I've written above.

Well, you can go ahead and abandon it if you want to but for me personally I think the answer is that Java, and in particular Spring Boot as a framework, provides an astounding set of drag and drop (more or less) solutions to pretty much all the challenges I meet in modern application development. It's just a fantastic framework that enables you to solve hard things very very fast.

So in the future we don't need the compile-once-run-everywhere-support from the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) but we DO want the fantastic frameworks written in the language.

Get started with Spring Boot and GraalVM

If I've convinced you enough to at least give it a try then get started by continuing to the Prerequisites section and we'll get some stuff installed!