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Microsoft Brews Up Java On Azure Cloud With London-Based jClarity Acquisition

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jClarity

Microsoft used to consider open source software to be a bad thing. But, as the song goes, that was yesterday. Today, Microsoft is a company on a mission to build as solid a reputation as possible for itself among the hard-core coders of the open source community and, equally, among the customers who view open platform innovation (albeit, often under commercially-supported paid for contract licenses that come with maintenance services) as the best way to buy technology.

Given the widespread embrace of open source languages, platforms and related technologies that Microsoft has very publicly exhibited, it is perhaps no surprise to find that an increasing amount of data on the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform is running some strain of Java. Acquired from Sun Microsystems by Oracle in 2010, Java’s essentially open approach is typified by its Write Once, Run Anywhere (WORA) mantra and its long heritage as an open platform and language.

Put two and two together then... and you might imagine that Microsoft would be looking to develop and acquire more Java application diagnostics know-how, especially where a technology has proven useful for managing live production environments in the cloud.

London (memory) calling

Clearly unperturbed by Britain’s Brexit maelstrom, Microsoft zoned in on London this month to snap up jClarity. The company’s Censum software is designed to track ‘memory leaks’ in cloud and on-premises Java applications working in unison with its Illuminate diagnostic engine, both of which make use of machine learning techniques.

In the virtualized world of cloud computing, every application gets a certain amount of memory allocated to it (which it gets from a memory call, programmed by the developer) during the time it needs to run, after which time that memory resource should be deallocated and then allocated onward for use elsewhere. When that goes wrong (often because the programmer has forgotten to deallocate the memory), then you have a memory leak and so you have an inefficient cloud, which is a bad thing, obviously.

Microsoft’s corporate vice president of program management for developer tools and services John Montgomery has said that 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.

“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,” wrote Montgomery, in a Microsoft blog post.

Acquisition position

All of which then has driven Microsoft to now announce the acquisition of jClarity. Redmond has noted that jClarity is the leading contributor to the AdoptOpenJDK project, an open source initiative to build and share prebuilt software ‘binaries’ (chunks of compiled software code in computer-ready format). Microsoft HQ further confirms that it will support the jClarity team in its mission to deliver continued contributions to open source. The team will do this while simultaneously driving increased performance for Java workloads on Azure, stated Microsoft.

“The jClarity team, formed by Java champions and data scientists with proven expertise in data driven Java Virtual Machine (JVM) optimizations, will help teams at Microsoft to leverage advancements in the Java platform. At Microsoft, we strongly believe that we can do more for our customers by working alongside the Java community. The jClarity team, with the backing of Microsoft, will continue to collaborate with the OpenJDK community and the Java ecosystem to foster the progress of the platform,” said Microsoft’s Montgomery.

According to the jClarity website, the company’s technology provides software performance analytics and tuning, driven by machine learning, designed to solve Java performance problems in cloud and desktop environments. Its performance diagnostic engine and machine learning algorithm software is designed to work with cloud and on-premises architectures and is said to be a ‘low impact’ tool, only activating for a few seconds when a diagnosis is requested.

Microsoft was here, earlier

The relationship with this team is not completely new. Since June 2018, Microsoft has sponsored the AdoptOpenJDK project to help build binaries of OpenJDK for different platforms, including Linux and Windows.

Based on the somewhat unfortunately named Scrutton Street in London’s ‘East End’, details of where jClarity engineers will be stationed were not released. Microsoft was equally tight-lipped in terms of letting us know how much it paid for the team and its Intellectual Property (IP) base of technologies.

Former jClarity CEO Martijn Verburg now lists his job title as principal engineering group manager for Java at Microsoft and the official announcement of the company’s acquisition was only made this week… so they barely let the coffee get cold. Verburg will no doubt be hoping for fresh brews from Microsoft in line with his team’s original open source ideals and no half-and-half measures.

 

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