EclipseCon 2021 took place October 25-28. EclipseCon has long been a world-class conference for all things Eclipse. With the Java EE transition to the Eclipse Foundation, EclipseCon has become a truly significant event for Jakarta EE and MicroProfile developers. Due to the pandemic, the 2021 event was virtual (and free!). Jakarta EE unsurprisingly had a strong presence at the conference with talks on Jakarta EE 9.x, Jakarta EE 10, MicroProfile 4.x, MicroProfile 5, Jakarta Security, Jakarta Concurrency, Jakarta REST, Jakarta NoSQL and MicroProfile GraphQL from speakers such as Tanja Obradovic, Ivar Grimstad, Josh Juneau, Otavio Santana, Emily Jiang, Steve Millidge, Arjan Tijms, Werner Keil, Ed Burns, Rudy De Busscher and Graham Charters. I delivered two talks and participated in a panel at the conference focused on Java, Jakarta EE and Azure. I also helped organize Community Day along with Werner Keil and Petr Aubrecht.
Jakarta EE at Community Day
Community Day was held on October 25th – the day before the start of the main conference. Community Day has always been a great event for Eclipse working groups and project teams. It has become a unique space for some very focused, unique, forward-looking content on Jakarta EE and MicroProfile. The sessions are intended not only for learning, but also for the community to actively engage with some key leaders.
This year we had some great sessions on Jakarta EE, MicroProfile, Jakarta Security, Jakarta Concurrency, Jakarta REST and Jakarta NoSQL presented by Tanja Obradovic, Ivar Grimstad, Will Lyons, Emily Jiang, Arjan Tijms, Steve Millidge, Andy McCright and Otavio Santana. You will find session abstracts, speaker profiles and more here.
Powering Java on Azure with Open Liberty and OpenShift
On the first day of the main conference, I and Graham Charters of IBM delivered a mostly slide free talk titled “Powering Java on Azure with Open Liberty and OpenShift”. The material covers the key work Microsoft and IBM is doing to enable Jakarta EE, MicroProfile, Open Liberty and OpenShift on Azure. We demo in real time how to stand up an OpenShift cluster on Azure quickly and deploy a realistic Java EE/Jakarta EE/MicroProfile application that integrates with some services on the cloud such as a database. The essential material for the talk is available on the Microsoft documentation site as a how-to guide. A recording of the talk is now available on YouTube.
It is worth reminding that myself, Ed Burns and our team are always ready to work closely with Java/Jakarta EE developers on Azure migrations – completely for free. To take advantage of this, you simply need to fill this survey out or reach out to me directly.
Earlier the same day I participated in a panel titled “Java is the ideal language for cloud-native applications” alongside YK Chang, Ed Burns, Emily Jiang, Neil Patterson, Vijay Sundaresan, Ivar Grimstad, Arjan Tijms and Alasdair Nottingham.
Effective Kubernetes for Jakarta EE and MicroProfile Developers
On the second day of the main conference, I delivered my entirely slide-free talk – “Effective Kubernetes for Jakarta EE and MicroProfile Developers”. The talk covers some of the key things Jakarta EE and MicroProfile developers need to know while using Kubernetes. This includes:
- How Kubernetes primitives (such as deployments, services and ingress controllers) align with application server administration, clustering, auto-scaling, auto-discovery, and load-balancing.
- How to add self-healing capabilities using Kubernetes probes and monitoring with open source tools like Prometheus/Grafana.
- How Kubernetes can be extended using Operators to effectively manage application server clusters.
- How the CI/CD pipeline of your application can be adapted to Kubernetes.
A recording of the talk is now available on YouTube.
All the material for the talk is available in self-paced workshop format on GitHub. The material will take you about a day to complete end-to-end (please reach out if you need any help).
I am very happy to have had the opportunity to contribute to EclipseCon, especially Community Day. I hope to participate again in the future.