News

Microsoft Buys jClarity for Azure-Based Java Workloads

• By John K. Waters
• 08/19/2019

In a bid to support its "continued contributions to open source while driving increased performance for Java workloads on Azure," Microsoft on Monday announced its acquisition of jClarity for an unknown amount.

Based in the United Kingdom, jClarity provides software performance and analytics solutions and is a leading contributor to the AdoptOpenJDK project.

"Microsoft Azure and jClarity engineers will be working together to make Azure a better platform for our Java customers and internal teams, improving the experience and performance of the platform for Java developers and end-users," said John Montgomery, head of program management for Microsoft's developer tools and services group, in a blog post.

"In the last few years, Microsoft's usage of Java has grown and now includes multiple large-scale deployments, such as Azure HDInsight and Minecraft. Additionally, Microsoft customers like Adobe, Daimler and Société Générale have brought their Java production workloads to Azure. With more than half of compute workloads running on Linux, Azure has become a great platform for open source, and that certainly includes Java."

Founded in 2012, jClarity makes lightweight performance analysis and monitoring tools for Java/JVM applications. The company's product portfolio includes Censum and Censum-as-a-Service (CaaS), which analyzes Java garbage memory problems, and the machine learning-based performance diagnostic engine Illuminate.

The jClarity team co-founded AdoptOpenJDK, the free OpenJDK distribution replacement for Oracle's Java, backed by such vendors as Amazon, Azul, GoDaddy, IBM, Microsoft, Pivotal, Red Hat and SAP. AdoptOpenJDK uses infrastructure, build and test scripts to produce prebuilt binaries from OpenJDK class libraries for both the OpenJDK HotSpot VM and the Eclipse OpenJ9 VM.

All AdoptOpenJDK binaries and scripts are open source-licensed and available for free.

Microsoft has supported AdoptOpenJDK since June 2018, helping to build binaries of OpenJDK for different platforms, including Linux and Windows.

jClarity CEO Martijn Verburg is director of the AdoptOpenJDK project, the co-organizer of the London Java Community (LJC) and a member of the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee (EC). The LJC is an official Java user group for developers based in London. The EC is the group of JCP members guiding the evolution of Java technology within the process. With this acquisition, Verburg becomes a principal manager of Microsoft's Java engineering group.

"It's always been jClarity's core mission to support the Java ecosystem," Verburg said in a blog post. "We started with our world-class performance tooling and then later became a leader in the AdoptOpenJDK project. Microsoft leads the world in backing developers and their communities, and after speaking to their engineering and program leadership, it was a no brainer to enter formal discussions. With the passion and deep expertise of Microsoft's people, we'll be able to support the Java ecosystem better than ever before!"

Microsoft has been upping its Java game over the past few years, with a free Java driver for SQL, a plug-in for the IntelliJ Java IDE, a Java SDK to provide app metrics to developers and promoting Java for cross-platform mobile app development.

"At Microsoft, we strongly believe that we can do more for our customers by working alongside the Java community," Montgomery said.