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Running Java with Preview Features in the Cloud - Part One

Introduction

I've been catching up on some features that have been added in recent versions of Java. The 6 month release cadence of new versions of Java is great, but can lead to a build up of new things to learn about.

The support for pattern matching in switch statements - JEP 406 - is particularly appealing, but for now it is still only available as a preview feature, meaning that at compile time and at run time we need to explicitly specify to enable preview.

A shallow view of the main cloud providers

A lot of online applications these days will run in some sort of cloud runtime environment.  Some examples from the main cloud providers are:

According to what the documentation currently specifies, AWS Lambda's pre-packaged Java environments only support versions 8 and 11 unless you bring your own Docker container. Similarly, Azure Functions only offer versions 8 and 11. This leaves us to consider Google Cloud Functions which supports and recommends Java 17.

What can we try out?

As far as I can tell, the Google Cloud Function way of running Java doesn't allow us to control command line arguments to the Java runtime, so we cannot simply specify --enable-preview that way.

This leaves us to try out customizing AWS Lambda to:

  • set up a Docker container including the Java 17 runtime
  • set up a wrapper script to pass --enable-preview as a command line paramater to make the lambda initialize with the functionality that we want.
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