Skip to main content

Time to make an exception to the LTS version policy?

Virtual Threads Improved 

I'm starting to dip my thoughts back into technology, in preparation for getting back into interviewing and getting back to working.

This week I had a listen to the latest episode of Josh Long's "A bootiful podcast" and was surprised to hear a strong push for going with non long term support (LTS) versions of Java.

A few days later I was watching a presentation about how NetFlix is using Java in 2025 (JavaOne presentation on Youtube), sure enough there Java 24 is also being applied in order to benefit from improvements to the use of virtual threads.

JEP 491 "Synchronize Virtual Threads without Pinning" seems to be enough of a driver for some organisations to push forward outside of the Long Term Support versions.

Non LTS in prod?

I've seen companies apply a simple policy of only permitting LTS versions in production, so now I'm curious about whether the broader Java community is moving away from that approach.

Potential Migration Limitation

For the types of systems that I have worked on in the past, I can see a potential blocker to slipping out of the LTS versions - cloud providers such as AWS offering systems such as AWS lambda are still only supplying LTS versions of the Java runtime in their bundled Java offering. 

So if you have workloads running in Docker or directly on an EC2 instance you wouldn't be able to smoothly transition it across to AWS lambda.

Just a matter of time

Java 25 is scheduled to be the next LTS version, so if you are prepared to wait a few months then sticking with the "LTS only" policy could also work okay.

Labels:
Location: Christchurch, New Zealand

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2022 - A year in review

Just a look back over the last 12 months. January I moved back to Christchurch to live, after having spent a few months further south since moving back from London. Work was mainly around balancing other peoples' understanding and expectations around our use of Kafka. February I decided that it would be worthwhile to have a year's subscription for streaming Sky Sports, as some rugby matches that I would want to watch would be on at time when venues wouldn't be open. Having moved to Christchurch to be close to an office, now found myself working from home as Covid restrictions came back into effect across New Zealand. March Got back into some actual coding at work - as opposed to mainly reviewing pull requests for configuration changes for Kafka topics.  This became urgent, as the command line interface tool that our provisioning system was dependent on had been marked for deprecation. April   Had my first direct experience with Covid-19.  I only went for a test because ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Speeding up Software Builds for Continuous Integration

Downloading the Internet Can you remember the last time you started out on a clean development environment and ran the build of some software using Maven or Gradle for dependency management? It takes ages to download all of the necessary third party libraries from one or more remote repositories, leading to expressions like, "Just waiting for Maven to download the Internet". Once your development environment has been used for building a few projects the range of dependencies that will need to be downloaded for other builds reduces down as the previously referenced ones will now be cached and found locally on your computer's hard drive. What happens on the Continuous Integration environment? Now consider what goes on when Jenkins or your other preferred Continuous Integration server comes to build your software. If it doesn't have a local copy of the libraries that have been referenced then it is going to pay the cost of that slow " download the Internet" p...
3 comments
Read more

Designing systems - The "ity"s That Limit or Enable Profitability

Introduction This started off as a little aide-mémoire to get my head into the right space for preparing for an interview. It's not an exhaustive list, and twists terminology that has been used to represent other things (see:  to Velocity), so don't treat it as a text book reference to work from. Most of the listed points can be associated back to so called "non-functional requirements" - NFRs. I don't like that particular terminology, so alternatively we might consider them as dimensions of the quality of the sytem. Usability "If you build it, they will come" should come with a provisor, "... but if it's awkward to use they'll soon go away, and might not come back." Security All of the aspects that combine to protect data from being seen or manipulated by anyone other than the intended recipient or sender, and also assuring users that the data has originated from the intended source. Velocity Here I'm cheating a bit by trying t...
Post a Comment
Read more