Why did you choose Java and its ecosystem?

I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about Java at university, but my professional path led me to it in a very logical way. I started with data science and BI, then at Paysafe I mainly worked with Oracle and PL/SQL.

Gradually, while working on real projects, I began to get into Java through smaller tasks. I liked the structure, the capabilities of the language, and the strong ecosystem, especially in the context of large payment systems.

Over time, Java proved to be a natural extension of what I was doing. It provided stability, a rich ecosystem, strong tooling, and excellent integration with the architecture and SDKs we use at Paysafe. I moved from small tasks to more complex initiatives, and at one point I simply found myself in a role where Java was my main tool, and it was completely conscious and logical.

How has your work as a Java programmer changed in recent years?

My work as a Java engineer has changed significantly in recent years.

The language and ecosystem are evolving rapidly, which has reduced boilerplate code and increased productivity, making work more enjoyable.

Also, almost everything is now cloud-based. Technologies such as AWS bring enormous advantages, but this also means that programmers now need to be much more familiar with cloud architecture rather than focusing purely on their code.

The pace of work is also more dynamic. Releases are more frequent and require constant learning and adaptation.

The biggest change is the advent of AI, which I use as a tool for discussing ideas and speeding up routine tasks, but not for critical implementations. It is a valuable assistant, but it requires a careful and responsible approach.

Which new technologies or versions of Java do you think will have the greatest impact in 2025?

Over the past 10 years or so, the Java ecosystem has undergone continuous improvements. This applies to the language itself, as well as to the JVM and accompanying Java tools.

In my opinion, the technology that has had and will continue to have the greatest impact is undoubtedly Project Loom.

For me, this is a revolution in Java—virtual threads enable huge improvements in system performance and scalability without the need for particularly complex changes to the existing code or additional infrastructure resources.

Added to this are Structured Concurrency and Scoped Values, which further improve Java’s concurrency model and lead to more efficient management of parallel tasks.

At the same time, developments in the JVM and improvements in garbage collection make the ecosystem faster, lighter, and better optimized for cloud environments, a factor that is key for modern platforms and microservice architectures.

To what extent can Java adapt to cloud environments, microservices, and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)?

I think Java is quite successful in adapting to industry requirements, mainly due to the development of the JVM itself, as well as frameworks such as Spring.

For example, effective management of hardware resources such as memory and CPU, due to the fact that the JVM is “resource-aware” to the container in which the application is deployed.

At the same time, modern Garbage Collection algorithms reduce overhead and make applications more stable and economical in cloud infrastructure.

The Spring Boot + Spring Cloud stack itself is the de facto standard in application development, specifically microservices in cloud environments.

It provides tools for service discovery, load balancing, centralized configuration, and much more.

This enables the Java ecosystem to create standalone, lightweight, fast-starting, fast, and easily scalable applications.

In my opinion, Java is not just adapting, but rather setting the standard in the industry.

What is the role of the open-source community and how does it support the development of Java?

The open-source community is perhaps one of the biggest forces behind the popularity and development of the ecosystem.

The OpenJDK project allows many companies and individual engineers to contribute improvements to the language, JVM, and tooling, which accelerates innovation and eliminates the risk of dependence on a single vendor. Without this model, the evolution of Java would be significantly slower and probably more expensive.

Open JDK allows everyone to have their own distribution, which they control without relying on a single vendor, and to use it according to their needs.

Many of today’s technologies in the ecosystem are due to it: Spring, Maven, Gradle, and many others arose precisely because the community had to solve a practical problem. Imagine dependency management without Maven/Gradle.

Every programmer can also challenge themselves and try to improve their skills by reviewing or even trying to contribute to an open source project.

I personally haven’t gotten there yet, but maybe in the future.

In short, I think that much of Java’s progress is due precisely to the active, strong, and innovative open-source culture behind it.

How do you keep your knowledge up to date in such a dynamic environment?

I try to keep my knowledge up to date by regularly reading articles, documentation, and technical blogs when time allows. Although I don’t always manage to pay attention to all the books and materials, I try to keep up with key developments in the ecosystem.

The team environment also plays a big role: conversations with colleagues, code reviews, and working on common tasks often reveal new approaches and technologies.

In my opinion, learning from other engineers is one of the most valuable things, regardless of position. The possibilities of the language are endless, and there is always something new to learn.

Here, I need to give a shoutout to one of my colleagues, Stefan Ivanov, who also works at Paysafe. He was the one who opened my eyes to virtual threads, which I had overlooked. Exactly one month later, I was already using them.

Do you think Java will remain one of the leading languages, and why?

I am convinced that Java will remain among the leading languages for many years to come. A huge part of global software—corporate systems, critical infrastructure, and government applications—is built on Java, and such a foundation cannot be replaced easily or quickly.

In practice, there is no other language that has proven itself and can consistently do a better job.

When we add the continuous innovations in the language and the JVM, as well as the strong open-source community, Java not only maintains its position but continues to evolve and become more accessible and attractive to new engineers.

The material and image are provided by Paysafe

“The Academy is a safe environment where you can experiment, make mistakes, and grow with the support of a mentor,”

says Yuliyan Stoyanov, Platform Architect and DevOps Team Lead at Amusnet.

“At the same time, the program reflects our strategic goal to build sustainable engineering teams and prepare future leaders who will drive technological progress for both the company and the software industry as a whole.”

Applicants are expected to have basic technical skills and a strong motivation to grow. The focus is on the participant’s potential and mindset, opening the door for more young professionals to face real engineering challenges and start their careers with valuable hands-on experience.

“You can see how a well-designed platform accelerates product development and makes the user experience more reliable. That’s what makes our DevOps initiative so meaningful and inspiring,”

adds Stoyanov.

The program has been created by Amusnet’s engineers and technical leaders in partnership with the Learning & Development team. It covers essential topics, from Linux and networking to automation, CI/CD processes, and modern technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure as Code with Terraform. Alongside technical expertise, participants will also develop crucial soft skills such as teamwork, incident management, and presentation, all competencies which are essential for career growth.

With its DevOps Academy, Amusnet demonstrates its strategic vision for advancing the industry through targeted investments in young talents – the engineers and technology leaders of tomorrow. Those eager to join the first edition of the Academy can learn more about this great opportunity on the career website of Amusnet.

The material and image are provided by Argent Group

“If you look at every other deploy and release vendor on the market, they’re built to service centralized release and operations teams who want tighter control over deploys. But this doesn’t reflect the reality of elite software teams who depend on developers to drive and deliver fast innovation. Our approach to CircleCI releases provides a developer-centric workflow that enables them to ship faster and monitor new features in production coupled with the safety net of quickly rolling back releases if something goes wrong”, said Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI.

According to the company, the main advantage of this new feature is that it can give developers more confidence in creating releases, as well as reduce the average time to fix issues.

With ongoing Kubernetes and Amazon SageMaker support, developers now have comprehensive visibility into their production deployments and access to rollback commands (e.g., version recovery, component scaling, and component restart).

Some of the key capabilities that will emerge with CircleCI releases include the ability to link CI/CD to customer experiences, real-time service validation, performance degradation prevention, and more.

The Release Dashboard shows a release history for all components with details for each, a list of release environments, and a list of components and associated projects.

The tech giant also announced that the first preview of .NET 9 and the third preview of .NET Aspire are now available.

Microsoft has indicated that the main areas where improvements will be made are cloud application development and artificial intelligence applications.

“We’ve spent the last several years building out strong cloud native fundamentals, like runtime performance and application monitoring. We will continue that effort. We’re also turning our focus to delivering paved paths to popular production infrastructure and services, for example running in Kubernetes and using managed database and caching services like Redis,” the .NET team at Microsoft wrote in a blog post.

To improve application performance in the cloud, the company is working on Native AOT. Despite its advantages, Native AOT requires the use of many tools that developers don’t normally work with, making it inaccessible.

Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code will include .NET Aspire, a cloud application development suite. New enhancements will be related to component configuration, debugging, integration with the developer dashboard.

The company is also working with its Azure Container Apps partners to ensure that .NET 9 applications can easily scale into their Kubernetes environments.

.NET 9 will also include features that allow developers to incorporate artificial intelligence into their applications.

In addition, Microsoft will continue to improve the libraries and documentation for the OpenAI and OSS models, as well as the workflow for Semantic Kernel, OpenAI and Azure SDK.

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“Korifi now offers users the power to transform container-based workflows and take advantage of Kubernetes scalability and resilience. We’re enabling developers to focus on innovation, without having to deal with infrastructure and become experts in Kubernetes”, said Chris Clark, program manager at Cloud Foundry.

This update streamlines container-based workflows by making Docker images compatible with existing containers at various stages of development, making it a valuable tool for teams already using container-based solutions.

With this support, users no longer need to write or maintain complex YAML configurations, as most lifecycle operations come with easily accessible workflows, Cloud Foundry explains.

“Within the Cloud Foundry community, we have been relentlessly focused on bringing the PaaS experience to Kubernetes infrastructure and now with Docker support, Korifi does that,” said Ram Iyengar, developer advocate at Cloud Foundry. “With Docker support, Korifi opens up interoperability with many existing workflows and is an important step towards making the project feature-complete in the Kubernetes ecosystem.”

Updates to Korifi in the new release include the following benefits.

• Works with existing workflows: Cloud Foundry Korifi’s support for Docker images facilitates interoperability with a wide range of existing workflows, making it relevant for teams already utilizing container-based solutions.
• Increased Productivity: Scaling becomes easier, and managing the container lifecycle is more efficient without having to deal with Kubernetes configuration.
• Improved Agility: Existing Docker-based workflows can co-exist and operate side-by-side with Kubernetes, providing an easy on-ramp for users.
• Reduced Complexity: With support for Docker images, there is no longer a need for writing or maintaining complex YAML configurations, and workflows for most lifecycle operations are readily available.
• New Installer: Simplifies Korifi deployment locally for first-time users.

“As organizations grow their Kubernetes footprints from a single cluster to multiple clusters that are shared between teams across a mix of environments, a consistent approach to Kubernetes management becomes critical.”

said Tobi Knaup, CEO and co-founder of D2iQ.

“DKP is unique in its ability to simplify Kubernetes management through state-of-the-art automation, whether you’re standing up your own clusters or using a service like EKS or AKS. At D2iQ, we are committed to delivering a turnkey intelligent platform to help customers realize the true business impact of their cloud-native journeys”,

he continued.

Key enhancements in DKP 2.5 include:

– Centralized multi-cloud, multicluster fleet management. DKP Enterprise 2.5 enables customers with multi-cluster deployments to more easily manage fleets of clusters through federating application management. This enables a central platform engineering team to ensure consistency and compliance regardless of where a cluster is running.

– Easily expand DKP from single-cluster management platform to multi-cluster fleet management platform. With DKP 2.5, you can easily move from managing individual clusters to managing your entire fleet of clusters.

– Enhanced DKP Insights: DKP Insights is your intelligent copilot that gives you Kubernetes troubleshooting superpowers. It analyzes clusters and ensures that best practices are being followed. It can analyze root causes and spot problems in advance, preventing costly downtime and speeding time to resolution.

– Enhanced monitoring, security, and networking with Istio service mesh. DKP 2.5 adds official support for the Istio service mesh in DKP clusters. This gives DKP customers microservice-based observability featuring dependency graphs and service-level monitoring.

DKP 2.5 provides organizations with a ready-to-deploy Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that is an “instant platform design” providing self-service capabilities by automating open source components. This establishes consistency and compliance and eases the burden on DevOps teams. This allows them to pay more attention and spend more time on higher-value tasks instead of wrestling with complex infrastructure issues.

Additional DKP 2.5 enhancements include:

– Support for Rocky Linux. Following Red Hat’s announcement of the end of life for CentOS, Rocky Linux is designed to be compatible with upstream CentOS source code. DKP users can now easily deploy and manage their clusters on Rocky Linux, providing flexibility for their infrastructure needs.

– Air-gapped environment management simplified with downloadable documentation. DKP 2.5 solves the problem of accessing documentation in air-gapped environments by providing the option to download DKP documentation from the D2iQ website. This enables customers to save the DKP documentation as a PDF that can be referred to in secure environments without network connections, minimizing risk.

– Lifecycle management of Microsoft AKS clusters from the DKP user interface.

– Ability to provision DKP on VMware vSphere infrastructure with Ubuntu 20.04 as the OS.

DKP 2.5 will be generally available this month.

Taking advantage of database virtualization technologies, Redgate Clone enables small and light clones of databases to be created manually or as part of an automated process, which can be used for development and testing, and as part of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines.

Teams working with SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle can now branch, reset and version their database instances at application-code speed as they develop, with zero risk of affecting other team members. To further improve modern development environments, Redgate Clone supports teams working across on-premises, cloud and hybrid architectures, including those running containers and Kubernetes.

Developers can now self-serve production-like clones of SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle databases in seconds, and validate database updates with an advanced set of tests, checks and reports, which can be run as part of an automated process. Because the virtual clones in Redgate Clone are quick to create, independent, and have minimal storage overhead, they enable consistent production-like development environments to be automatically provisioned in seconds, and free developers from working on shared databases, enabling them to carry out their work and test new ideas without the risk of disrupting each other.

Testing with consistent, realistic, and compliant datasets throughout the development process means developers can catch data-related issues long before they reach customers. All of which increases efficiency, minimizes costs, standardizes practices across development teams, improves the quality of software releases, and releases value to customers faster.

Importantly with Redgate Clone, a clone of an entire instance can be spun up with all of its databases and configuration data. As a result, teams are not blocked by cross-database dependencies, greatly improving their ability to develop features and resolve issues.

The ability of the clones to be versioned as work progresses also enables developers to restore to a given point in time to restart or remedy their work if an issue arises. And to further improve efficiencies, Redgate Clone runs as a central service and removes the maintenance overhead of local database instances and agents.

When used to standardize test data management practices across databases and teams, and across architectures and containers, Redgate Clone improves the quality of the data used in testing, the safety of that data, and the speed at which databases and applications can be developed.

By reducing the skills barrier, risk and IT management burden, the new capabilities can increase the reliability and efficiency of enterprise-class Kubernetes while delivering compound cost savings for large-scale Kubernetes environments.

“The new capabilities will help our enterprise customers simplify the management of their large-scale environments, improve the reliability of their operations, and optimize their resources. With OCI offering the best cloud for optimally scaling Kubernetes via a seamless management experience and unrivaled price-performance, customers will be able to drive their businesses forward while realizing cost savings of up to 50 percent compared to other cloud providers”,

said Vijay Kumar, vice president, product marketing, app dev services & developer relations, Oracle.

Recent updates include:

– Virtual Nodes: These enable organizations to run large-scale Kubernetes-based applications and help ensure reliable operations without the operational complexities associated with managing, scaling, upgrading, and troubleshooting the underlying infrastructure.

– Add-on Lifecycle Management: Provides organizations with greater flexibility to install and configure their chosen add-on operational software or related applications.

– Workload Identity: Enables organizations to improve security and reduce management overhead with identity control and access management at the capsule level.

OKE’s latest updates enable customers to accelerate their journey to cloud-native and help them simplify their modernization efforts. Innovate faster and improve developer productivity. By helping customers transition infrastructure management to the cloud service, they can realize significant cost savings across their expanding Kubernetes sites.

Go ranks 10th in the March edition of the index, after ranking 11th the previous month. The last time the language was in the top 10 list was in July 2017. Its return to the top spot again in the March 2023 index is due to its popularity among software engineers and its strength in combining the right features. This includes built-in concurrency, garbage collection, static typing, and good performance.

According to TIOBE, Google’s support also helps by improving long-term confidence in the language. The Go language is perhaps best known for its use in developing the Docker container system and the Kubernetes container orchestration system.

Whether Go will remain in the top 10 remains to be seen, as Tiobe said the position in the top 10 of the index changes almost every month.

We also present the Top 10 languages in the Tiobe index for March 2023:
1. Python, 14.83%
2. C, 14.73%
3. Java, 13.56%
4. C++, 13.29%
5. C#, 7.17%
6. Visual Basic, 4.75
7. JavaScript, 2.17%
8. SQL, 1.95%
9. PHP, 1.61%
10. Go, 1.24%

Tiobe’s index scores are based on the number of qualified engineers globally, the courses and third-party providers associated with each language. The ratings are calculated using popular search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo.

The enhanced experience for Java developers in Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ IDE offers the ability to provision a Git repository when creating a project using Application Accelerator for VMware Tanzu in Visual Studio Code IDE. The generated code will be pushed to the provided repository, so developers can simply commit their changes to the repository instead of using a manual set of steps.

The Developer Sandbox for Visual Studio Code and IntelliJ allows developers to update their code in real-time – as well as simultaneously debug the updated code – without having to turn off Live Update when debugging. This can make code iteration even faster, as a full code build is not required when running a debug session. Source code changes can be continuously synchronized with the running container.

Developers can now debug while the source code is being built and deployed through the development cluster supply chain, from within the IntelliJ IDE. The Activity Pane in the Tanzu panel can visualize supply chain steps, display detailed error messages, and allow developers to view resource logs without leaving their IDE – eliminating the need for context switching.

Tanzu Application Platform 1.4 also offers increased flexibility through API lifecycle management. Tanzu Application Platform helps teams design, deploy, and manage APIs. With Tanzu Application Platform 1.3, you could configure workloads with the associated API specification and automatically expose them in the Tanzu Application Platform GUI using ready-made, secure supply chains.

Enhanced IT operations experiences for Jenkins and Kaniko integrations allow Tanzu Application Platform to meet customers where they are, supporting customization and use of their existing development tools and pipelines on the way to production.

Customizing supply chain stages is easier with Tekton integrations. Tanzu Application Platform helps organizations build secure paths to production by providing ready-made defaults and supporting tools that teams may have already adopted.

The introduction of shared routes that are visible across all Cloud Foundry spaces simplifies the process of migrating applications from one space to another.