“We migrated a global bank with tens of thousands of desktops from OracleJDK to OpenJDK over a weekend,” says Azul’s James Johnston.
The bank was not alone in making this move.
Recent licence changes by Oracle for its Java SE platform mean that instead of paying for the amount of Java they use, CIOs and their peers ultimately pay according to their company’s number of employees.
That’s driving many organisations to rethink their Java estate.
You'd be staggered what's running on Java – and you'd be staggered what's running on unsupported legacy Java – James Johnston
There are significant cost gains to be achieved by shifting off Oracle, says Johnston, as well as efficiency and security improvements, including for versions no longer supported by Oracle like Java 6 and 7.
Johnston, the EMEA chief for Azul, the largest pure-play company 100% focused on Java and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), speaks of the migration (“more of a software upgrade than a migration”) modestly.
Later in an interview with The Stack he muses that the biggest challenge when it comes to growing Azul’s rapidly expanding customer base is that “some customers think that what we offer is too good to be true…”
“They ask ‘how are we able to provide the level of support and have the level of price point that we offer?’” he reflects – saying that Azul is typically able to cut customers’ Oracle Java support fees by 70%..
Oracle’s Java licence and pricing shift has raised the burden of policing IT leaders’ use of the venerable and widely used programming language and platform, lest they fall foul of Oracle’s famously rigorous audit procedures.
The impact is clearly illustrated in Azul Systems’ recent report on “Oracle Java Usage, Pricing and Migration”, which drew responses from almost 700 participants from across the globe: Just 14% are planning to stick with Oracle Java; a quarter have already left for alternatives such as OpenJDK.
A fifth are currently in the process of moving their entire production estate, as that global bank did one rather busy weekend. The remainder are either planning or moving some or all of their base to a OpenJDK alternative.
No shock and audits
Azul, says Johnston, doesn’t do audits: “We provide the option of an unlimited license. It takes away any of that nervousness around a lack of understanding of their Java; many don't really know how much they have, who's activating it, where it resides” – and this in itself is a risk, he says.
In short, customers are coming to Azul not just to reduce cost, ongoing price changes and Oracle audit risk (that exposes previously unknown and suddenly highly expensive Oracle JDK use) but for world-class support for applications running on all operating systems, architectures, and versions of Java.
Oracle stopped supporting Java 6 in December 2018 and extended support for Java 7 ended in July 2022. Azul on the other hand still supports, maintains, and patches both – something critical to mitigating cybersecurity risk as well as for compliance with upcoming regulation like DORA. That mandates a strong ICT risk management framework and using unsupported OpenJDK distributions can expose organisations to significant risk; identifying and mitigating it is critical.
OpenJDK supports the vast majority of mainstream applications and Java Foundations like Kafka, Spark, Cassandra, and Hadoop
Just recently, Johnston says, Azul has been approached by three organizations who “have highlighted Java as being on their risk register. “That means, in short, they do not have a current supported version.”
As well as its migration services and OpenJDK implementation, Azul’s Intelligence Cloud SaaS-based solution helps customers find vulnerabilities, “patch them and mitigate risk, and ensure that they're compliant” he adds.
Johnston points out that Azul’s OpenJDK-based implementation and Oracle’s are identical.
“We license from Oracle the Technology Compatibility Kit which verifies that our OpenJDK is interchangeable with Oracle Java SE. Likewise, we sit on the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee, the OpenJDK Vulnerability Group, and the Eclipse Adoptium Working Group, as well as contribute code updates and fixes as does Oracle anda number of other leading vendors into the OpenJDK open source project.”
OpenJDK, Johnston says, supports the vast majority of mainstream applications and Java Foundations like Kafka, Spark, Cassandra, and Hadoop: “There's situations where customers may have licensed a legacy third-party software solution built on Java, and we work with those individual ISVs.”
He adds, “We'd obviously encourage customers to have a project management methodology just to ensure that they're able to prioritize the right workloads to be migrated and then run that. In the event a customer does not have the capacity, we can lend a hand as well as have a wide array of channel partners to assist in the implementation.
Download your free “OpenJDK Migration for Dummies” guide here
“Any organization that wants to learn more, we even wrote the book – OpenJDK Migration for Dummies – which includes our migration methodology and an understanding of implementation corner cases to migrate legacy Java features like applets” he adds to The Stack.
This might all sound too good to be true. Certainly, says Johnston, the biggest brake for companies considering migrating off Oracle Java, is often their own fears about how complex the process will be in practice.
But the research showed that nine out of ten OpenJDK migrations were accomplished in two years or less, with three quarters taking less than 12 months. Almost a quarter were achieved in less than three months; 41% of respondents to Azul’s recent survey found it easier than expected.
“It's quite an interesting conversation when we talk to customers,” says Johnston. “Our focus is often just allowing those customers to understand what we can do and it’s a lot more than most realise, at a greater depth and a far more reasonable price point than many had realised.”
Delivered in partnership with Azul.
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