Microsoft gets some jClarity on Azure Java workloads, swallows London-based firm

Microsoft has snapped up London-based jClarity in an effort to bump up the performance of Java workloads on Azure.

We're pretty sure that somewhere, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's brain just exploded, or he has a heck of a headache. For everyone else, it is further evidence of continued changes at the Beast of Redmond.

jClarity – founded by Martijn Verburg, Kirk Pepperdine and Ben Evans – has a product line aimed at identifying performance problems in cloud and on-premises Java applications. The company makes use of machine learning to hunt down memory leaks in its Censum tool and performance problems in its Illuminate diagnostic engine.

The gang also provides commercial support for AdoptOpenJDK binaries, a drop-in replacement for Oracle's suddenly expensive Java/JDK.

Microsoft had already kicked a bit of sand Big Red's way by bundling open-source Java outfit Azul Systems' Zulu Embedded with SQL Server 2019 and shovelling Zulu for Azure onto its cloud.

The jClarity acquisition is further evidence of Microsoft's acceptance of Java and open source as essential in the modern development world. After all, with workloads such as Minecraft running in its cloud as well as those of other customers such as Adobe and Daimler all needing Java, optimisation is essential.

And, of course, let's not forget that more than half of Azure's compute workload is now Linux-based.

Former jClarity CEO Verburg (now Principal Engineering Group Manager for Java at Microsoft) was understandably terribly excited about the turn of events.

He asked for patience from the community on which his company has depended in the past, proffering some reassurance: "Don't worry – we are not going away whatsoever!"

While Microsoft remained tight-lipped on what it had paid for jClarity, it did highlight its sponsorship of the AdoptOpenJDK project since June 2018, aimed at building binaries of OpenJDK on different platforms including Linux and Windows. ®