Java Licensing - Microservices

dotsman

Hi guys,

just wondering if anybody has any experience with the licensing side of this.

Basically, with Oracle having changed the licensing last year, I am trying to understand how this impacts a micro-service cloud-based architecture. If my understanding is right (and it may well not be!), it seems to punish those adopting micro-services disproportionately.

Let's say, instead of a single monolith, I am deploying 15 separate spring-boot apps into docker containers, each into their own VM on the cloud and each VM has 2 vCPUs do I need 30 licences?

And, am I right that this adds up to ~ €8,000 per annum?

What about a second (passive) node? Do I need to have licenses for that?

Am I right in my assumption that dev/test environments don't require a license?

Finally, is there are (real) downside to just using OpenJDK, other than having to update every 6 months (and is that really an issue or just enforcing good practice!)?

TuringBot47

dotsman wrote: »

Finally, is there are (real) downside to just using OpenJDK, other than having to update every 6 months (and is that really an issue or just enforcing good practice!)?

Major versions of OpenJDK are supported for 6 years, not 6 months.
We've moved to OpenJDK completely.
No real issues with it at all.

Talisman

Use OpenJDK - Java SE is just a build that passes the Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) tests and that requires a license. Amazon Corretto is a flavor of OpenJDK certified as compatible with the Java SE standard.

Buford T Justice

As above, the company i work for has moved to openJDK and we've had minimal issues

dotsman

Cheers guys. All good to know. Can't see any reason to go with paying for Oracle.

Didn't realise that major versions came with LTS (had read somewhere in the past that a disadvantage of OpenJDK was that only the latest release was supported).

Definitely going to go with OpenJDK. Now just need to figure out which of the many flavours to use! AdoptOpenJDK with OpenJ9 VM seems to be a good choice or possibly Corretto. Will need to do a bit more research...

cython

dotsman wrote: »

Cheers guys. All good to know. Can't see any reason to go with paying for Oracle.

Didn't realise that major versions came with LTS (had read somewhere in the past that a disadvantage of OpenJDK was that only the latest release was supported).

Definitely going to go with OpenJDK. Now just need to figure out which of the many flavours to use! AdoptOpenJDK with OpenJ9 VM seems to be a good choice or possibly Corretto. Will need to do a bit more research...

One thing may be to look at what the base OS of your container(s) is/are in case that lends itself to one in particular, as (for example) if you were using RHEL or even CentOS/Fedora then the RedHat maintained build may be the most easily integrated.

Buford T Justice

All of our microservices are deployed via kubernetes using openjdk:11