Although the business world is increasingly moving away from the Oracle JDK, Java is still almost ubiquitous and is predominantly used in the cloud. 

These findings are from the first ever Azul State of Java Survey & Report intended as:

an authoritative guide to understanding the current pulse, trajectory and sentiments surrounding Java.

Areas explored in the survey include Java adoption trends, the effect of Oracle’s latest Java pricing change, the migration of Java apps to the cloud and how companies are optimizing cloud costs, as well as security considerations for common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs). The report is based on responses during May-June 2023 from more than 2,000 Java users globally.

The question of whether Java is a waning technology is one that we have considered several times over recent years, finding reports of its decline greatly exaggerated. Its good standing is confirmed by Azul in that of all the businesses surveyed for its report, an overwhelming 98% use Java in their software applications or infrastructure, and 57% of those organizations indicate that Java is the backbone of most of their applications. 

On the other hand Oracle's Java is in decline with only 10% of respondents using only the Oracle JDK, and a further 32% using at least one Oracle instance together with non-Oracle distributions of the OpenJDK. This means almost 60% of respondents have no Oracle versions.

As Kay Ewbank reported, in January Oracle changed its pricing model from being based on the number of processors used by Java applications to the total number of employees and contractors in the organization. These pricing changes are motivating more businesses to move away from Oracle and the survey found that more than 7 out of 10 (72%) respondents were considering open source alternatives such as OpenJDK, and of those who were not, 14% said it didn’t occur to them that they could.

We have previously reported that users were reluctant to move on from Java 8, the long term support version released in 2014, and that there was a general reluctance to adopt later versions. While this survey confirmed that the long-term support (LTS) versions are adopted preferentially, it showed the more recent LTS versions, Java 11 and Java 17 to be the most used, at 48% and 45% respectively. Azul comments that the end of free updates for Oracle JDK 8 in 2019 is likely to be a contributing factor to the adoption of newer LTS versions. 

Businesses are also embracing JDK languages other than Java:

While only 23% are Java-exclusive, Kotlin, the newest JVM language, is being used by almost half (47%) of respondents. Older JVM languages are also in use - Groovy by 43%, Scala by 30% and Clojure by 22%.

Java can these days be characterized as the language of the cloud. As the report puts it:

Java is decidedly cloudy as 90% of respondents are using Java in a public (48%), private (47%) or hybrid (40%) cloud environment.

In fact 29% of respondents have a cloud-first strategy. The main reasons for moving their applications to the cloud for scalability, flexibility, productivity and agility.

Cost is one of the clouds big problems and the majority of companies surveyed (95%) have taken steps to lower their cloud costs in the past year. One of the main reasons for paying too much in cloud costs is overprovisioning cloud resources. The survey found that 70% of companies are not utilizing 20% or more of the cloud resources they pay for. The most popular measure to reduce public cloud costs among respondents (48%) is to right-size resources and 46% of businesses are taking advantage of a high-performance Java platform to use cloud resources more efficiently.

More Information

 Azul State of Java Survey and Report 2023

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