An analysis of the Java applications observed by New Relic showed nearly one-third of organizations (31%) are using the Amazon Java development kit (JDK) compared to 28% using the Oracle JDK as more Java applications are built and deployed in the cloud.
The report also found the number of Java applications running in containers is remaining steady year-over-year at 70%.
Overall, the report published last week found more than 56% of applications are now using Java 11 in production, followed by Java 8 at nearly 33%. However, more than 9% of applications are now based on Java 17, representing a 430% growth rate.
Jemiah Sius, director of developer relations for New Relic, said it’s clear that Java 17 is starting to gain traction in production environments. This is happening at a faster rate than previous releases of the venerable programming language as more cloud-native applications based on containers are being built and deployed, noted Sius.
Regardless of the version of Java, it doesn’t appear developers are moving away from Java as they build cloud-native applications, noted Sius. Rather than requiring developers to learn a new programming language, it’s simply been more cost-effective to enable them to continue building applications using a programming language they already know.
Java, meanwhile, has been experiencing a renaissance after more organizations began contributing to projects once the core platform became available under open source licenses. In fact, the Java community is now adopting many concepts pioneered in other programming languages to enable organizations to, for example, drive digital business transformation initiatives that are dependent on legacy applications being modernized. As a result, most organizations will continue to deploy Java applications everywhere from the network edge to the cloud.
New Relic, of course, is betting that as more cloud-native applications are deployed, the need for an observability platform that addresses the needs of developers and IT operations teams alike will become more apparent.
In general, most organizations are still in the early stages of achieving full-stack observability. A recent New Relic survey found only 27% of respondents have achieved full-stack observability and only 5% claimed they have a mature observability practice in place. A third (33%) of respondents also said they still primarily detect outages manually or based on complaints, the survey found.
On the plus side, the survey also found nearly three-quarters of respondents said C-suite executives in their organization are advocates of observability and more than three-quarters of respondents (78%) saw observability as a key enabler for achieving core business goals. However, more than half (52%) of respondents said they experienced high-business-impact outages once per week or more and 29% said they take more than an hour to resolve those outages.
The expectation is that that augmenting DevOps teams with observability tools and platforms that are increasingly being infused with artificial intelligence (AI) will reduce outages, even as cloud-native applications make IT environments even more complex than they already are. The issue is, however, those application environments are becoming more complex at a rate that is far exceeding the pace at which observability platforms are currently being adopted.