Java Without the JVM? A Journey into Spring Boot Native Images
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The Cloud Bill That Didn’t Make Sense
In the mid-2000s, Java was considered a heavyweight. A ravenous monster devouring all available hardware resources.
Between Java 6 and Java 8, several improvements were added to Java, such as improvements to the Garbage Collector, improvements to the JIT, and improvements in memory usage.
In Java 11, many of the historical performance concerns were significantly reduced, making it competitive with native languages in many scenarios.
At this time deploying a Java application felt like a victory. You packaged your JAR, spun up a server, and everything worked. Memory was cheap, servers were predictable, and startup time was just a number nobody really cared about.
Then the cloud happened.
Suddenly, every megabyte had a price. Every second of startup time mattered. And running ten instances of your application didn’t feel like scaling—it felt like burning money.
I remember looking at a simple Spring Boot service deployed in a container. It did almost nothing. A couple of endpoints, a database connection, some basic logic.
And yet:
- It consumed hundreds of megabytes of RAM
- It took several seconds to start
- It scaled slowly under load because of startup latency
It didn’t feel right.
We weren’t solving business problems anymore—we were feeding infrastructure.
That’s when I started asking a dangerous question:
