A survey of 2,039 Java professionals finds 88% work for organizations considering moving away from Oracle Java because of cost (42%), preference for open source software (40%), Oracle sales tactics (37%), uncertainty created by ongoing changes to pricing and licensing (36%) and restrictive Oracle policies (33%).
Conducted by Azul, a provider of an alternative platform to Oracle Java, the survey also finds that nearly two-thirds of respondents report that Java workloads still account for more than 50% of their cloud compute costs. As a result, many organizations are looking for more efficient compute instances and processors (35%) or are shifting toward higher-performance instances of a Java Development Kit (JDK) (24%).
Azul Deputy CTO Simon Ritter said as more organizations either look to build new Java applications or modernize existing ones using microservices to make Java codebases simpler to update and manage, they are evaluating their platform options with an eye toward reducing costs. In fact, 65% of respondents said Java workloads account for more than half of their cloud computing expenses.
Nevertheless, Java remains core to building applications in the enterprise, with nearly 70% of respondents reporting at least 50% of their applications are either built with Java or run on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). A total of 50% also noted their organization uses Java to build artificial intelligence (AI) applications. A full 72% said their organization will likely need to increase their compute capacity to support Java applications with AI functionality.
Overall, the survey finds nearly half of respondents (49%) are now running either Java 17 or Java 21. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are not also running older versions of Java. Still, most organizations generally prefer to use what they perceive to be more stable versions of software that are typically a release or two behind the latest version, said Ritter. More than half of respondents (52%) use more than one version of Java.
Additionally, 62% of respondents noted that dead or unused code impacts the effectiveness of their DevOps teams and that security challenges result in DevOps teams wasting more than half their time addressing false positives from Java-related security vulnerabilities at 33% of the organizations that survey respondents are employed. The challenge, as always, is that many of the vulnerabilities being identified are later found to not actually have been loaded into the software running in a production environment, noted Ritter.
Nearly half (49%) of respondents also reported their organization is still experiencing security issues stemming from older versions of the open-source Log4j log management software that is still being found in production environments three years after the initial discovery of a now infamous zero-day vulnerability that shines a spotlight on the need for increased adoption of best DevSecOps practices.
Arguably, application development teams have never had more options when it comes to building applications. However, there remains a clear preference for Java, based on the simple fact that most application developers in the enterprise continue to prefer to work with the tools they already know, especially when new functionality is being added to Java platforms at a faster rate than at any time in memory.