Microsoft acquires jClarity to boost Java on Azure

Today Microsoft has announced on the acquisition of jClarity, the leading contributor to the AdoptOpenJDK project, to support their continued contributions to open source while driving increased performance for Java workloads on Azure. The 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.

Microsoft has been a sponsor of AdoptOpenJDK, which has provided binaries for both Windows and Linux, with its acquisition of Java support services company jClarity, Microsoft will make a play to optimize Java workloads on its Azure cloud platform.

At Microsoft, we strongly believe that we can do more for our customers by working alongside the Java community. Usage of Java at Microsoft has grown in the last few years. Large-scale Java deployments include the AzureHDInsight analytics service and Minecraft.

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.

The jClarity team are JVM experts who have helped their customers optimize their Java applications while also providing leadership and support within the Java open source community. For us, this is the perfect match. The relationship with this team is not new: since June 2018, Microsoft has sponsored the AdoptOpenJDK project to help build binaries of OpenJDK for different platforms, including Linux and Windows.

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.