Amazon has released a preview of Corretto, a no-cost, multiplatform, production-ready distribution of OpenJDK. The announcement was made soon after Amazon promised to continue long-term support for the OpenJDK 8 and 11 runtimes in Amazon Linux. Amazon plans to make Corretto the default OpenJDK on Amazon Linux in 2019.

The announcements by Amazon were partially prompted by Oracle saying it would end free long-term support for OpenJDK after January 2019. Amazon will continue its support in Amazon Linux at least until June 2023.

The news of the new product was made by James Gosling, original creator of Java, in the opening keynote of Devoxx BE in Belgium. Devoxx is an annual Java, Android and HTML5 community conference. This is the video of the keynote including the announcement:

Gosling described Corretto as a drop-in replacement for all Java SE distributions, apart from situations that aren't currently handled by OpenJDK, and those workloads that need to be run on non-HotSpot JVMs. Amazon says it runs Corretto internally on thousands of production services and Corretto is certified as compatible with the Java SE standard.

The preview version of Corretto is Java 8 equivalent, and there are currently installation binaries for Amazon Linux, macOS, and Windows. When the product reaches general availability in the first quarter of 2019, support is also planned for Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Corretto 11, which is equivalent to OpenJDK 11, will be made available during the first half of 2019.

Amazon creates its own patches and improvements in Corretto so it can be used in situations that have heavy performance and scalability demands, and the patches and improvements will be made available to customers with no-cost, long-term support, with quarterly updates including bug fixes and security patches. AWS will also provide urgent fixes to customers outside of the quarterly schedule. This all sounds attractive, but does mean customers will be exchanging a reliance on one large scale company with another that has a growing hold on the overall technology market.

More Information

Amazon Corretto Website

Devoxx Website

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