Usage of native images in the cloud gives various advantages like faster application start-up and low memory usage. Developers would like to build the native image of our Java application at times based on the requirements. In this blog, we will walk through the Spring Native framework, which will give Spring Boot applications to have improved native compatibility and less memory footprint.
What is Spring Native Beta?
The Spring team has launched a new Spring module, Spring Native Beta, which will help to transform current Spring Boot applications in JVM-based languages such as Java, Scala, and Kotlin, to GraalVM native images. This is entirely a new way of deploying spring boot applications and they run differently too. GraalVM native images are highly optimized, they start up quickly and they are small too. The drawback as of now is prolonged build times and fewer runtime optimizations achievable compared to the JVM. The Spring team is working in partnership with the GraalVM foundation to optimize this too.
Typical use cases:
- Sustainability – Cheap and small instances in the cloud
- Boost Serverless computing – Instant start-up and instant peak performance
- Kubernetes – Provides lightweight pods for Kubernetes and thus enhances scalability
- Microservices – Reduce cost-cutting due to low memory footprint
How to use?
We can create a new project with the facility to add native dependency is available at Spring Teams’ reference location https://start.spring.io/
Steps to bring up a production-grade native enabled Spring Boot application is well-documented
reference location https://docs.spring.io/spring-native/docs/current/reference/htmlsingle/
Conclusion
Spring Team is trying to build a framework for the next decade. For this, they have made strong collaborations with the GraalVM team and the integration between them will continue to increase. We can try out today Spring Native to compile our Spring boot application to native executables. The Spring team has documented several examples of integrations of Spring Native with other Spring projects at the reference location https://github.com/spring-projects-experimental/spring-native/tree/main/samples
