News

Zing JVM Now Available as RHEL AMIs on AWS

• By John K. Waters
• October 13, 2015

Java runtime solutions provider Azul Systems has made its flagship Zing JVM available as Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company announced. The new 64-bit Java AMIs are available from the AWS Marketplace.

Zing is a Java Virtual Machine based on Oracle's HotSpot JVM, a core component of Java SE. It's a "no-pause" JVM designed to eliminate Garbage Collection (GC) pauses, a long-standing challenge for Java developers. This pauselessness, which Azul calls "generational pauseless garbage collection" (GPGC), enables Java app instances to scale dynamically and reliably. Scott Sellers, CEO and President of Azul Systems, has called GC "the Achilles heel of Java."

"We continue to see more and more enterprises deploy their business-critical Java applications in the Cloud," Sellers said in a statement last week, "and this partnership with Red Hat accelerates Java adoption on AWS...."

An AMI is an encrypted machine image that provides the information needed to launch a virtual server in the Amazon cloud. According to Amazon, each AMI includes a template for the root volume for the virtual server (which Amazon calls an "instance"), such as an OS, an application server and applications; launch permissions that control which AWS accounts can use the AMI to launch instances; and a block device mapping that specifies the volumes to attach to the instance when it's launched.

This collaboration also brings Azul into the RHEL ISV Ecosystem, said Mike Werner, senior director of the Global Technology Partner Ecosystems group at Red Hat. The Ecosystem acts as a certifying body for apps and environments running Red Hat products. This partnership in particular provides Red Hat with a means of extending RHEL as a secure and reliable platform for cloud-based Java workloads, he said.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Azul bills itself as the only company focused exclusively on the Java runtime. It's one of only two companies currently providing cross-platform JVMs; Oracle is the other one. (IBM, Red Hat and some niche providers offer JVMs specific to their other products.)

Other Azul AMIs are currently available in the AWS Marketplace, including Zing on SUSE Linux, Zing on Ubuntu and Zing on Amazon Linux.

Azul Systems made the announcement at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Zing on RHEL is available now.