Replacing Legacy Java EE App Servers With Microservices and Containers

Lightbend recently ran a survey of more than 2000 JVM developers, and the results just got published. The survey was launched to discover correlations between development trends and IT infrastructure trends, how organizations at the forefront of digital transformation are modernizing their applications, and real production usage break-downs of today’s most buzzed-about emerging developer technologies. While you can download the complete results from the official website, I would love to highlight some particular things that I found very interesting. Especially around containers and microservices.

Containers Are Democratizing Infrastructure and Challenging the Old Guard Java EE App Servers

The momentum around containers has ramped up much more quickly than many anticipated. People are looking at containers as the great hope for infrastructure portability that they’ve been chasing for a long time. And I was always interested in learning about how containers are actually used by developers in the wild. And bottom line is that containers are really happening in production right now. "What types of applications are people putting in containers?" That's the $1 million question. Today, it’s primarily greenfield applications, with far fewer examples of legacy applications being modernized for containers in production. This is the reason that everybody is looking for more leightweight approaches to run their applications on JVM without the overhead of Java EE servers. The survey has more details about the kinds of containers and orchestration models used.

Microservices and Fast Data Are Driving Application Modernization Efforts

Microservices-based architectures advocate the creation for a system built from a collection of small, isolated services, each of which owns their data and is independently isolated, scalable, and resilient to failure. Services integrate with other services in order to form a cohesive system that’s far more flexible than legacy monolithic applications. But how is this taken into production? Are people already building those systems or is this just a hype? Almost one-third of the respondents run a microservice-based system in production. And as I've been talking about in my talks, the driver is mostly the need for real-time data handling and streaming requirements.

The survey reveals a lot more, and I strongly suggest that you look at the details of it. One thing is for sure, the changing requirements placed on today's architectures can't be easily met by just creating new applications on old platforms. And even Java EE is starting to adopt those new principles, as JavaOne will hopefully show in a couple of days. I will keep you posted.