When billing costs in the cloud are based on resource usage, the general advice is simple: usage less. In this session, we’ll research how to build size-compact, cloud-native Java applications that are optimized for deployment in resource-constrained environments.
We’ll focus on packaging a Spring Boot web server into slim, distroless, and scratch containers—each providing just adequate operating strategy to run the application. Along the way, we’ll discuss the trade-offs of these approaches, and show how smaller containers not only reduce resource usage but besides are faster to transfer and deploy, which is critical in autoscaling scenarios.
The session will dive into GraalVM Native Image configuration options that enables static linking and stripping out unused code, and additionally experimentation with Jlink to make a customized Java runtime.
Additionally, we’ll research the advantages of switching from standard JVM-based Paketo Buildpacks to those that support ahead-of-time compilation. Finally, we’ll show how to automate the full process—building, optimizing, and containerizing—using CI/CD pipelines.