News

Quarkus 1.0 Kubernetes-Native Java Stack Set for GA

• By John K. Waters
• November 6, 2019

Red Hat today announced that Quarkus 1.0, the Kubernetes-native Java framework the company introduced in a beta release in March, will become generally available at the end of November.

Quarkus is a lightweight, high-performance framework designed to reduce the footprint and latency of Java applications, specifically for cloud-native architectures, such as microservices, containers, and serverless. It's tailored for the GraalVM and HotSpot JVMs, and combines support for the imperative programming model with support for cloud-native, event-driven, asynchronous, and reactive models in the same platform, explained Jason Greene, Quarkus project co-founder and distinguished engineer at Red Hat, in a blog post—all of which allows organizations to continue to leverage their Java know-how.

Quarkus is designed to work out of the box with popular Java standards, frameworks, and libraries, including the Eclipse MicroProfile, Apache Kafka, RESTEasy (JAX-RS), Hibernate ORM (JPA), CDI, Spring, Infinispan, and Camel, among others. "Developers can choose the Java framework they want to use when Quarkus applications are running on the JVM," the company said in a statement.

It also includes MicroProfile OpenTracing for observing traffic patterns among services, and MicroProfile Metrics for exposing JVM, Quarkus runtime, and custom application metrics to monitoring systems, such as the Prometheus platform.

Emmanuel Bernard, chief architect on data at Red Hat and another Quarkus project co-founder, announced the pending GA in a blog post.

"Today marks a real milestone for the Quarkus community and the Java community at large," he wrote. "…The community has worked really hard to up the quality of Quarkus in the last few weeks: bug fixes, documentation improvements, new extensions and above all, upping the standards for developer experience."

The final release of Quarkus 1.0 builds on the work of the previous releases, Bernard said, and includes several new features:

• A reactive core based on Vert.x to make reactive programming a first-class feature of Quarkus
• A new non-blocking security layer, which enables reactive authentications and authorization, and also enables reactive security operations to integrate with Vert.x
• Improved Spring API compatibility, including Spring Web and Spring Data JPA, as well as Spring DI
• Support for Java 8, 11 and 13 when using Quarkus on the JVM. Java 11 native compilation support is also planned for the near future.

"True to our Open Source roots, we have released early, released often," Emmanuel said. "Since our first announcement of Quarkus back in March 2019, you have seen 30 releases over 36 weeks. That's one every nine days with new features each time."

This release sets the stage for "a vibrant ecosystem that goes beyond Quarkus Core," Bernard added.

"The Quarkus ecosystem (fondly called 'universe') is the set of extensions working together and fully supporting native compilation via GraalVM native image. Anyone can define an extension and publish metadata to be available in our code.quarkus.io catalog and Maven/Gradle tools."

The project currently counts 177 contributors "with loads of enthusiasm" in that ecosystem. Bernard encouraged others to participate in the process. "Now it's time to do your part: test Quarkus 1.0.0.CR1 and join us," he said.