Written by: Jon McDonald
Edited by: Lillian Castro
TL; DR: The Payara Server and Payara Cloud platforms offer reliable and secure deployments of Jakarta EE applications that meet the requirements of modern enterprise software developers. The projects grew out of Payara’s research on datacenter engineering and enterprise needs. Payara Server programmers leveraged the Eclipse GlassFish framework — which provides an open-source runtime environment for Java Enterprise Edition — now Jakarta EE – to create a fully-supported replacement for GlassFish with additional features that make it ideal for production environments. Payara Cloud simplifies cloud infrastructure management by eliminating the need for application servers and Kubernetes knowledge.
Payara Server has become one of the leading solutions for production Jakarta EE applications. Java technology has been around for more than 25 years but is still popular for corporate application development.
Payara’s virtualization and automated cloud hardware scalability products give Java technology new life through Jakarta EE. The company is an Eclipse Foundations Solutions member, on the Project Management Committee, and is a Strategic Member of the Jakarta EE Working Group, working alongside IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, and other ecosystem companies to develop the open-source Jakarta EE platform.
Agile teams can take advantage of Payara features to modernize legacy Java applications on the Jakarta EE framework. Business DevOps teams also have access to a full suite of monitoring, metrics, health-check, and security software included.
Payara Server provides full support for Java app hosting requirements on Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, and the Google Cloud Platform, designed for enterprise organizations.
Jadon Ortlepp, the Digital Marketing Coordinator at Payara, told us the main benefits of the platform was that it offers “the easiest migration from GlassFish and for maintaining security and stability in production environments on premise, in the cloud, or hybrid.”
The Eclipse Foundation manages the GlassFish runtime distribution of Jakarta EE. The Eclipse GlassFish distribution implements Jakarta EE specifications and supports hosting enterprise software in production.
Payara’s product line offers end-to-end hosting solutions that modernize Jakarta EE application development. They include Payara Platform Community Edition, Payara Platform Enterprise Edition (featuring both Payara Server and Payara Micro) and Payara Cloud.
“Payara Micro Enterprise is the microservices-ready version of Payara Server. You can run war files from the command line without any application server installation,” Jadon said. “Automatic and elastic clustering makes Payara Micro the open-source platform of choice for running Jakarta EE (Java EE) applications in a modern virtualized infrastructure.”
Leveraging Open-Source Platforms to Modernize Java Software
Modernizing legacy Java software applications for public, hybrid, and multicloud runtimes is complex for enterprises. But programming teams can meet that challenge with the Payara Cloud and its microservices offerings. Payara is a strategic member of the Java EE and Jakarta EE open-source ecosystem, alongside IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, Fujitsu, and Tomitribe.
According to Ortlepp, the company initially worked with Red Hat and IBM as a GlassFish consultancy agency in 2014, supporting enterprise clients running applications on the GlassFish application server. That work then grew into the creation of the fully-supported, drop-in replacement for GlassFish, Payara Server; and Payara Micro, collectively known as the Payara Platform. Clients can use the Payara Platform with Kubernetes, AWS EC2, Azure, or Docker Swarm for elastic scalability. In 2021, Payara Cloud will launch, making it possible to deploy and manage Jakarta EE applications without the complexity of building and maintaining infrastructure.
Payara Server Enterprise is a cloud-native middleware solution for Java and Jakarta EE applications. It containerizes code to support microservice integration in public cloud environments. The platform allows developers to use Docker to guarantee microservice availability when modernizing apps. That allows large organizations to implement cloud strategies quickly.
“Payara InSight provides real-time monitoring and alerting solution offering detailed insight into the status of the application or your system in an easy-to-use graphic user interface. Payara InSight is included in Payara Server Enterprise and together with MIcroprofile Metrics helps determine the health of your system and makes it possible to analyze the time series of values to identify trends and act before the system experiences problems,” Jadon said. “MicroProfile Metrics expose the metrics in the Prometheus format by default.”
Payara Micro Enterprise allows developers to deploy containerized Jakarta EE microservices deployments with no application server installation, additional configuration, or code rewrites needed.
The Payara Platform Community Edition is a subscription-free distribution that lets developers test the server technology, try out new features, and run projects in development.
Payara Server is Cloud-Native and Provides Support with DevOps Tools
Platform, among other popular cloud providers, while Payara Micro offers pre-configured integration for Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform to simplify Java Enterprise Applications. Jadon said the company aims to be aggressively compatible with all public cloud runtime platforms and builds new features by focusing on the developer experience.
Payara solutions integrate with some of the most popular code editors in the desktop environment. They include support for version control utilities, automated code testing across pipelines, and other DevOps tools for cloud network administration.
Payara’s commitment to the open-source community allows users to describe features they need to support Java and Jakarta EE development teams, leading to more innovations.
IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, and other major IT companies in the Jakarta EE ecosystem have been promoting the lift and shift model of modernization — also known as rehosting — as a best practice for companies transitioning from on-premise datacenters to public cloud architecture. The Payara Server and Micro distributions are both designed to migrate existing Jakarta EE apps into the cloud, or build new, cloud-native applications on public cloud using your development team’s existing programming skills.
“Platforms such as Eclipse MicroProfile allow for an easy integration of Enterprise Java applications as microservices. Combined with Kubernetes, MicroProfile is a powerful tool to simplify securing microservices, monitoring them and creating reproducible deployments,” Jadon said.
Payara Server often exceeds the standards and functionality of other popular enterprise products for Java programmers. Developers can also review the benchmarks to decide if the solution is a fit for them.
Quickly Build Applications in Private, Public, or Hybrid Environments
The Payara Server, Payara Micro, and Payara Cloud platforms are all considered disruptive technologies within the Java and Jakarta EE development ecosystem. Payara developed the Payara Platform on open-source fundamentals with an international, distributed team located across the U.S., Europe, India, and South Africa. Payara Cloud followed as their first web-based product offering, with the goal of becoming the next generation of cloud-native application runtime that drastically reduces the time and effort required to get your applications running on the cloud.
In 2021, Payara won the Queen’s Awards for Enterprise that recognizes outstanding achievement by UK businesses in the categories of innovation, international trade, sustainable development, and promoting opportunity through social mobility. Many consider the award equivalent to a knighthood for businesses. Payara serves the Java enterprise space on a global scale and is a significant part of the datacenter solution in education, astronautics, medicine, finance, and other projects worldwide.
Payara Server is a leading solution for building modernized applications in private, public, or hybrid environments. Its use of Docker container virtualization allows the entire service weave of a web server stack to bundle as a complete distribution image, including code, database, and runtime extensions. Kubernetes integration allows Java and Jakarta EE apps to scale automatically in elastic frameworks across public cloud or private cloud hardware in a vendor-agnostic manner.
“To take advantage of an elastic, scalable deployment without worrying about virtual machines, network elements, and other IaaS concerns, Payara Server and Payara Micro integrate with containerization technology — including Docker and Kubernetes.”
Payara Server: Designed to Meet Enterprise Software Requirements
Payara designs innovative solutions to meet the requirements of enterprise software modernization using Jakarta EE, MicroProfile, and Docker. Payara Server, Payara Micro, and their tools help convert legacy code for lift and shift modernization and make it possible to build new applications on cloud with your existing team’s Jakarta EE programming skills.
Payara worked with IBM, Red Hat, Oracle, and other IT companies to build the open-source Jakarta EE platform that enterprise institutions, including government, education, and nonprofits, can navigate.
The Payara Platform Enterprise Edition includes a 10-Year Software Lifecycle guarantee that helps IT managers make strategic choices for public cloud runtimes supporting Java applications.
Payara Cloud eliminates the need for application servers and configuration of Kubernetes, Docker, routing, and certificates to automate the process of running Jakarta EE applications on the cloud using a serverless, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) architecture. Payara Cloud automates cloud infrastructure for enterprises, making it possible to upload your WAR, click deploy, and immediately run your applications on the cloud.
Jadon said Payara bases its feature development on the server distribution and cloud platform needs of everyday Java programmers and developers. And they can use its wide range of solutions on projects that need to scale to support the traffic levels of even the world’s largest websites.
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