Azul Zulu Has First-Mover Java Advantage On Docker
Azul Systems, the long-time maker of Java acceleration appliances that has transformed itself into a provider of Java runtime environments for X86 systems, is leaping on the Docker software container bandwagon and claiming first-mover advantage as the only implementation of the OpenJDK open source Java runtime that is certified to run on top of Docker and that has enterprise-grade technical support available.
Azul has two kinds of JVMs and runtimes that it sells. The Zing Java virtual machine is the older of the two products and is based on the substantial amount of software engineering that Azul did to create a JVM that was tuned to hardware accelerators that it created to significantly boost the performance of Java applications. A few years back after JVM performance had come a long way and X86 processors were equipped with features that allowed for JVMs to be accelerated on CPUs rather than on adjunct processors, Azul shifted its efforts from the hardware appliances to a highly tuned Zing JVM stack. EnterpriseTech explained how Priceline.com makes use of Zing to accelerate its workloads earlier this year, and also detailed the new ReadyNow features aimed at financial trading firms trying to get around the JVM warmup issue they face every day of trading. Zing is priced more or less in line with the commercial-grade Oracle HotSpot and IBM JVM 7 alternatives.
With Zulu, Azul is grabbing the open source OpenJDK implementation of the JVM and related code and hardening it and packaging it for commercial use. The software is freely distributed and has a commercial support contract available. The Zulu JVM launched about a year ago and made its debut as the open source Java available on Microsoft's Azure public cloud. Since that time, Azul has expanded its support matrix to cover all manner of hypervisors, operating systems, and clouds running on X86 machinery. Zulu does not have all of the performance tweaks that Zing has, but it can be viewed as a stepping stone towards Zing as customers need to squeeze more throughput out of and get lower latency from their Java applications. Zulu support comes in a Standard Edition with quarterly releases and business hour support terms and a Premium Edition with out-of-cycle bug fixes, early release access to new code from OpenJDK, and a 24x7 support term. Pricing starts at $1,000 per physical server, and ramps down with volumes quickly to around $250 per server when customers are using Zulu on a few thousand boxes.
The rapid rise of Docker as a new and lightweight form of virtualization for the Linux platform has been well documented here at EnterpriseTech, so it is no surprise that Azul is eager to hitch its wagon to Docker. What might be surprising is just how fast Docker is being adopted in the enterprise.
"We have been tracking Docker for some time, as we do with any megatrends in the industry," Scott Sellers, founder and CEO at Azul, explained to EnterpriseTech. "What changed for us fairly recently are customers telling us that they were not only interested in Docker, but that they are actually actively replacing their traditional virtual infrastructure with Docker. This was a big signal that Docker is not just hype, but it really is starting to happen now."
Some very large customers in consumer electronics and financial services, whom Sellers cannot name and who are in industries that are often on the cutting edge of technology transitions, have committed to moving their virtualized Linux applications to Docker. In these cases, the customers have tens of thousands of servers, and many multiples of that of virtual machines, under management. These are not small accounts by any measure. And almost universally, says Sellers, the customers that are approaching Azul for support of a JVM on Docker are looking to replace VMware's ESXi hypervisor and vSphere and vCenter extensions to it. Sellers is quick to point out that this does not mean the end of VMware by any stretch of the imagination – and we would point out that the bulk of what ESXi is used for is to virtualize Windows workloads in enterprise datacenters.
The widespread adoption of virtualization in general and the development of Linux containers (LXC) had to exist for Docker to take off, says Sellers. "Enterprises had to be comfortable with these technologies before Docker could ever become successful. Usually it is the second or third incarnations of technologies that really have a run with it, and this is what is happening here. There is nothing fundamentally new about Docker, but it is all coming together at the right place at the right time."
Docker has the potential to be the common virtualization layer across public and private clouds – at least for Linux applications, anyway. Docker does not support Windows or other operating systems. The idea is to take the application portability that comes through Java and its JVM and extend it up another layer so that the application software and its back-end elements can all be wrapped up in containers and then passed around as need be across infrastructures. So it becomes write once, configure once, run anywhere.
So why Azul Zulu JVM on Docker? At this point, Zulu is the only completely open source and commercially supported implementation of the OpenJDK that has been certified for Docker. That means it can be put in the Docker Hub and become part of the Docker workflow. Moreover, Zulu supports Java SE versions 6, 7, and 8 and is still the only one supporting 8. Docker supports over 13,000 applications at the moment, and has had over 23 million downloads in the past three months alone.
Zulu releases have a ten year lifetime and customers control when they upgrade. (Oracle is putting its Java 7 implementation of HotSpot out to pasture in April 2015.) Zulu runs on Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012 R2 as well as the Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 desktop versions and Mac OS X. On the Linux side, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 or later or 6.0 or later and their CentOS clones are supported, and so is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP1, SP2, and SP3. Canonical's Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS and 12.04 LTS variants of Linux are also supported. For hypervisors, the recent releases of VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and various KVM implementations (the biggies are from Red Hat, SUSE Linux, and Canonical) are supported. Zulu has been certified to run on the Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Cloud, and Microsoft Azure public clouds, too.
As for the high-end Zing JVM, Sellers tells EnterpriseTech to expect a Docker-certified version "fairly soon."
