Last week, Azul issued a press release announcing that London-based Vitruvian Partners and New York-based Lead Edge Capital are making a majority investment in the company.
Azul’s mission has always been to deliver the best Java possible. Initially, this was focused on solving the issues associated with garbage collection and the non-deterministic pauses that can be introduced to application responsiveness. The first product was a hardware solution using massively multi-threaded proprietary processors in the Vega Java Compute Appliance, launched in 2005.
Thanks to the reality of Moore’s Law, the need for a specialised hardware solution became unnecessary and, in 2010, a software-only solution was launched in the form of the Zing JVM. This uses the C4 algorithm for garbage collection, which is a pauseless collector that runs (and compacts) concurrently with application threads. Since then, Zing has been further improved to include the Falcon JIT compiler as a replacement for the HotSpot C2 version and ReadyNow technology with compile stashing to dramatically reduce warmup time of JVM-based applications.
Most recently, in 2013, Azul launched the Zulu binary distribution of the OpenJDK, available for both desktops/servers as well as embedded applications. With the changes made to the Oracle JDK licensing terms and conditions, this has rapidly grown in popularity, both free Zulu Builds of OpenJDK and the commercially supported Zulu Enterprise edition.
Given Azul’s focus on Java, we have also been very active in supporting the wider Java community, the OpenJDK project and the Java Community Process (JCP).
Azul regularly sends speakers to conferences and Java User Group (JUG) meetings as well as supporting projects like the Marlin graphics renderer and AdoptOpenJDK.
Since 2011, Azul has been on the JCP Executive Committee as well as being represented on the Java SE Specification Request (JSR) expert group since Java SE 9.
Azul’s Andrew Brygin is the lead for the OpenJDK 6 update project and, on March 4th, Yuri Nesterenko of Azul was approved as the lead of the OpenJDK 13 update project. This is to provide greater choice for Java users; Azul is offering extended support in the form of Medium-Term Support (MTS) for two versions between Long-Term Support (LTS) ones.
The good news is that Azul will continue to operate independently and be managed by its current executive team. Our new investors see growth in demand for high-performance Java runtimes as well as fully supported distributions of OpenJDK.
The even better news is that Azul intends to increase our contributions to projects like the OpenJDK both through continued support for older versions and ideas we have for enhancements we can contribute. We’re hiring more JVM and JDK engineers so we can continue to innovate in areas such as JIT compilation as well as JVM startup and warmup performance.
If you haven’t tested Zing or Zulu, why not try them for free today?
