One of our honored MVBs, Patrick Debois, organized the DevOps Days conference in Goteborg this weekend, and I found a really great perspective blog by Simon McCartney—a Java developer who was worried that he might be the only guy not running a Ruby or Python stack at the conference:

I kind of expected to be the fuddy duddy in the room (my group runs 4 SaaS services, our largest is a LAMP+JBoss SIP stack, a Solaris/Tomcat/Oracle/Coherence stack, a Linux/Tomcat/MySQL stack and a Apache/Weblogic/Cognos/Oracle stack, all hosted on our own hardware, how retro), so I was prepared to hear stories of how easy it was to deploy services built on modern interpreted stacks to the cloud, but I was pleasantly surprised to hear that plenty of people are using java application servers of all shapes & sizes in production. I was less pleased to hear, but somewhat comforted, that everybody running java stacks in production is suffering pain somewhere (damn, no silver bullet to take home). -- Simon McCartney

So there you have it.  Although Ruby programmers may be leading the chargehttp://java.dzone.com/node/add/articleO simply because of all the Ruby-based tooling available (Puppet, Chef, Vagrant), there's still plenty of interest on the Java side. 

Be sure and take a look at his post, which covers some of the topics discussed that were relevant to Java devs: 

Orchestration
Hot/Cold deployments
WAR/EAR vs. exploded web apps directory
Environment & configuration
Ops in the Java servlet steering committee.

Source: http://www.mccartney.ie/wordpress/2011/10/246/