Serverless

Quarking Drools: How we turned a 13-year-old Java project into a first-class serverless component

Quarking Drools: How we turned a 13-year-old Java project into a first-class serverless component

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By Mario Fusco and Edoardo Vacchi

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” (Edsger W. Dijkstra)

Rule-based artificial intelligence (AI) is often overlooked, possibly because people think it’s only useful in heavyweight enterprise software products. However, that’s not necessarily true. Simply put, a rule engine is just a piece of software that allows you to separate domain and business-specific constraint from the main application flow. We are part of the team developing and maintaining Drools—the world’s most popular open source rule engine and part of Red Hat—and, in this article, we will describe how we are changing Drools to make it part of the cloud and serverless revolution.

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Introducing Quarkus: a next-generation Kubernetes native Java framework

Introducing Quarkus: a next-generation Kubernetes native Java framework

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By Jason Greene

Java was introduced to the open-source community over twenty years ago and to this day, it still remains very popular among developers. In fact, it has never ranked lower than #2 on the TIOBE Index. Java was born in the mid-90s and has nearly twenty years of optimizations for running highly dynamic monolithic applications that assumed sole ownership of (virtualized) host CPU and memory. However, we now live in a world dominated by the cloud, mobile, IoT, and open source, where containers, Kubernetes, microservices, reactive, Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), 12-factor, and cloud-native application development can deliver higher levels of productivity and efficiency. As an industry, we need to rethink how Java can be best utilized to address these new deployment environments and application architectures.

We’d like to introduce you to Quarkus and Supersonic Subatomic Java!

Quarkus is a Kubernetes Native Java framework tailored for GraalVM and HotSpot, crafted from best-of-breed Java libraries and standards. The goal of Quarkus is to make Java a leading platform in Kubernetes and serverless environments while offering developers a unified reactive and imperative programming model to optimally address a wider range of distributed application architectures.

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Processing CloudEvents with Eclipse Vert.x

Processing CloudEvents with Eclipse Vert.x

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By Matthias Wessendorf

Our connected world is full of events that are triggered or received by different software services. One of the big issues is that event publishers tend to describe events differently and in ways that are mostly incompatible with each other.

To address this, the Serverless Working Group from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) recently announced version 0.2 of the CloudEvents specification. The specification aims to describe event data in a common, standardized way. To some degree, a CloudEvent is an abstract envelope with some specified attributes that describe a concrete event and its data.

Working with CloudEvents is simple. This article shows how to use the powerful JVM toolkit provided by Vert.x to either generate or receive and process CloudEvents.

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Upcoming Book: Vert.x in Action (MEAP)

Upcoming Book: Vert.x in Action (MEAP)

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By Julien Ponge

I am pleased to announce that my upcoming book “Vert.x in Action: Asynchronous and Reactive Applications in Java” is now available from the Manning early-access program (MEAP): (See below for the exclusive Red Hat Developer discount code)

As enterprise applications become larger and more distributed, new architectural approaches like reactive designs, microservices, and event streams are required knowledge. The Eclipse Vert.x framework provides a mature, rock-solid toolkit for building reactive applications using Java, Kotlin, or Scala. Vert.x in Action teaches you to build responsive, resilient, and scalable JVM applications with Vert.x using well-established reactive design patterns.

Vert.x in Action teaches you to build highly-scalable reactive enterprise applications. In this practical developer’s guide, Vert.x expert Julien Ponge gets you up to speed in the basics of asynchronous programming as you learn to design and code reactive applications. Using the Vert.x asynchronous APIs, you’ll build services including web stack, messaging, authentication, and access control. You’ll also dive into deployment of container-native components with Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift. Along the way, you’ll check your app’s health and learn to test its resilience to external service failures.

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EventFlow: Event-driven microservices on OpenShift (Part 1)

EventFlow: Event-driven microservices on OpenShift (Part 1)

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By Hugo Hiden and Matthias Wessendorf and Simon Woodman

This post is the first in a series of three related posts that describes a lightweight cloud-native distributed microservices framework we have created called EventFlow. EventFlow can be used to develop streaming applications that can process CloudEvents, which are an effort to standardize upon a data format for exchanging information about events generated by cloud platforms.

The EventFlow platform was created to specifically target the Kubernetes/OpenShift platforms, and it models event-processing applications as a connected flow or stream of components. The development of these components can be facilitated through the use of a simple SDK library, or they can be created as Docker images that can be configured using environment variables to attach to Kafka topics and process event data directly.

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Natively compile Java code for better startup time

Natively compile Java code for better startup time

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By Faisal Masood

Microservices and serverless architectures are being implemented, or are a part of the roadmap, in most modern solution stacks. Given that Java is still the dominant language for business applications, the need for reducing the startup time for Java is becoming more important. Serverless architectures are one such area that needs faster startup times, and applications hosted on container platforms such as Red Hat Openshift can benefit from both fast Java startup time and a smaller Docker image size.

Let’s see how GraalVM can be beneficial for Java-based programs in terms of speed and size improvements. Surely, these gains are not bound to containers or serverless architectures and can be applied to a variety of use cases.

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