Graeme Rocher with DevOpsSpeakeasy at DevoxxMA 2022

hello everybody I am Melissa McKay we’re

getting ready to start another devops

Speakeasy session here at devox Morocco

and I am sitting here with graham Rocher

hello would you like to introduce

yourself to the audience thanks for

having me yes Graham Russia I’m the uh

architect Oracle Labs on Micronaut

um and I work with the girl VM team as

well so uh yeah I’ve been working on

Oracle for a few years now and also

created a couple of relatively

well-known Frameworks in the Java World

Grails before Micronaut yeah nice and

worked in The Groovy community so yeah

nice so Grails one of my first projects

that I ever worked on was Ruby on Rails

yeah way back when is girls inspired by

that absolutely yes it was uh you know I

was I looked at Ruby on Rails it was

ages ago back in like 2006 and it was

you know revolutionary at the time at

the time

um and probably still there there’s in a

lot of ways and uh we had a lot of enemy

in the Java world like why can’t we have

this you know same coolness in on the in

the Java ecosystem

and you know I was doing projects with

spring and hibernate and jabber and yeah

so we’re both can’t deal with this and

um but I was also doubling with groovy

at the time for like some like online

Generation

Um of e-learning courses and so forth so

I thought you know why can’t we use

groovy to like have the same experience

as Ruby on Rails but in Java

um so I started rails and and yeah the

rest is history I suppose it kind of got

pretty popular

um

and uh you know a large community in in

like in like between 2007 and 2015 kind

of thing and it still has a large

community

and still is probably unrivaled when it

comes to rapidly generating crud uis and

so forth for databases so right yeah I

love your perspective you have on that

why can’t Java have this coolness and it

absolutely can but it takes people like

you in the community to produce that you

know make that happen it’s not just

magic this is something that the Java

Community can work on this is something

where we can all get together and decide

what we want and this is what’s

happening right now right with the jdk

with getting you know new releases out

there getting this release schedule

going and making sure that we’re

responding to what the community

actually needs and as far as features

and stuff in Java well

another item that I want to talk with

you about is based on your session that

you had the first day here yeah I did a

deep dive yes and would you just give us

a quick summary and then I want to

unpack it a little bit sure yeah I did a

deep dive on Micronaut and growl the app

so Micronaut is relatively new compared

to Grails it’s like four years old but

it’s a Java framework

um that uses compilation time processing

to optimize your application during the

compile phase

uh and that’s what I’ve been working on

uh for the last four years and last you

know at Oracle Labs that’s what I do on

an everyday basis is work on Micronaut

uh with that with the team there

uh so uh and you know with the girl VM

team and gravyam is a is a um virtual

machine out of Oracle Labs that you know

works with the regular jdk by plugging

into the jet that also allows you to

compile uh self self-contained native

executables uh which which is you know

proving very popular use case for a lot

of folks especially on

serverless command line apps that kind

of thing yeah that makes sense so

something I’ve heard in the past is you

know why would you put Java out in the

cloud that’s that’s goes territory

that’s that’s other you know languages

or other Technologies and um I think

with crawl VM with Frameworks like

Micronaut it makes it more feasible more

possible and it just makes sense so well

first of all there’s one thing to say

about that is that you know uh people

have been trying trying to say the Java

is dead for years and as much as you

people like to repeat it like it’s it’s

just never gonna happen and jobber is

already in the cloud right right Java

Powers you just

the vast majority of the cloud and

they’re a massive job Java based

companies out there that you know

companies like LinkedIn and Twitter and

all these massive companies that Netflix

that run Java in the cloud and are based

on So like

um yeah go has had some uptake in Cloud

applications especially with kubernetes

being you know trendy whatever but

ultimately jabber has a huge foothold in

Cloud applications

um having said that there’s definitely

been a drive to optimize Java for

running in containerized workloads

especially on kubernetes for serverless

right for Tech and that’s where a

language like go can have the edge when

it comes to like cold starts and keeping

memory footprint low

um

um and uh gravity I’m native image has a

great role to play there because you

know it can convert a normal Java app

using a closed level analysis into a

native executable that run when it runs

containerized right and uses very little

memory is extremely fast to start up so

you get all the benefits to go but you

still get you know the massive mature

Java ecosystem with its you know amazing

IDE tooling that you don’t get in other

languages whether it’s IntelliJ Visual

Studio code eclipse or the mature build

ecosystem around Gradle and Maven

um you know jfrog with the artifactory

ETC and you know all the security and

maturity you know of the platform in the

ecosystem is you can get to maintain

that but you know just build your

application into a neighbor native

skeetable when you need it yeah

and there’s really been a concerted

effort over the last few years to make

Java lighter and Micronaut has had a

huge

role to play in that you know more

lightweight applications smaller run

times moving more logic into the

compiler you know because originally

most Java Frameworks and you know

traditional Technologies

were built for that time when we used to

run Java applications inside servlet

containers or you know the cloud AE

containers right

um

so when you have to um

now optimize instead of deploying Wall

Files and jar files we have to deploy

Docker containers you know exactly

language in the platform has to adapt a

bit and it’s doing that yeah and I think

we’re doing an excellent job of that I I

loved your presentation on Micronaut

let’s talk about that a little bit more

sure

um one of the items in there that you

expounded on quite a bit is reflection

and how Micronaut deals with reflection

can you talk to the audience a little

bit about that yeah sure so you know I

spent a lot of time

in the 2010s looking at

how we could optimize

the startup performance of Grails and

spring applications

and you know whenever I was deep in with

my head in the profiler and the memory

profiler and you know analyzing

workloads it always came down to the

bottleneck being you know just reading

all the reflection information

um because if when used at scale it can

you know take a lot of time and memory

to load all the reflection data into

memory

um

and it’s one of the reasons why you know

uh when Java is used in Android contacts

they you know none of the Frameworks for

Android allow or you know

the use of reflection because it’s

um it’s inefficient from a memory usage

perspective because it essentially

initializes reflective data for the an

entire class so if you have a if you

have a class that has 100 methods and 50

fields you get 100 references to those

methods and 50 references to those

fields exactly which are not garbage

collected until you know the

um Technologies they’re held in software

references and so until the application

is actually running out of memory which

is not ideal with so with micro note we

shifted that to

compile what we you know essentially

method handles and handles to fields and

so forth

um at compilation time and we maintain

you know only the methods that we need

to invoke from the framework

um and that that keeps memory

consumption lower because we never have

to touch the reflective information

um that makes sense and then that

includes you know competing All The

annotation information that build time

and and so we don’t have to test the

annotations we never have to initialize

the actual reflective data

um which is which is really useful in

keeping memory low

um and keeping the runtime small yeah so

we don’t we don’t need all this

infrastructure at runtime to do the

analysis at runtime all of that analysis

happens in the compiler interesting

um so when you build like an application

itself it’s actually you know smaller

right

um and you can see that with

you know some of our Solutions you know

so an example of that is Micronaut

serialization

which lets you serialize and deserialize

Json to and from java objects you know

and it supports like 90 of what

capabilities of Jackson data bind okay

um but Jackson is like 2.4 megabyte jar

file right it’s massive because at

runtime because it has so much

um infrastructure in place to

uh you know use reflection to Cache the

reflective data to analyze your classes

and it needs all this runtime weight uh

whilst microphone sterilization is like

300 kilobytes right

um which which you you thought

developers often don’t think about that

jar file sizes but then when you

transfer translate that into a native

image with a group called VM uh it’s

actually a five megabyte reduction in

the size of the Native executable right

wow

um so if you’re going crazy

um you know you’re shrinking your images

which is which is good yeah and this is

good because

in yeah I think we assume

maybe everyone understands why this

makes a difference and it’s it makes a

big difference in Cloud native

environments just because you know

startup time yes

costs yeah if your containers are coming

up and down

um a lot so you need to scale

um you know down to zero or scale down

to one or you know you’re using Auto

auto scaling in the cloud you want those

instances to come up as as quickly as

possible and if you think about it as

well as if you have a a cluster of

containerized applications if if you

spin up 10 of them right and

um each container requires 500 megabyte

of memory right that’s a lot of memory

that’s being used for 10 instances right

first if you’re using uh Native Native

image you know each running instance is

only occupying like 50 megabytes right

so you can you can actually scale out

more applications in parallel right wow

so it’s about scaling up and scaling

down within containerized workloads and

um and then also optimizing for the

architecture that you’re building for

yeah

so just like Grails got the coolness of

Ruby on Rails in Java we now have Cloud

native coolness for Java as well I love

seeing that there’s a lot of movement

here there’s a lot of improvement like

you said it is not dead this is a

language that’s going to continue to

grow and continue to adapt as our needs

change so I’m just curious what is your

background originally what’s the first

language you learned

wow well

I got it I uh

um I guess I don’t know probably many

people uh through the gaming industry so

I love you know video games the fun way

yeah video games and as a kid I love the

game so you know

um and you know I played uh

in the 90s I was playing games like doom

and

Wolfenstein and and Quake and that that

is actually what got me into programming

because

um I the actually the first language I

Learned was that was uh probably not the

easiest language to learn first but it

was a variant on on C called Quake C so

Quake the game had a variant of the C

language called Quake C and I was like

yeah I really want to make these

explosions bigger or all right all right

I I really want you know the Rockers to

fire like you know not in a straight

line but like this so I started getting

into programming modifications for games

and this is you know when I was like 15.

more or less nice and that’s what

actually got me into programming so you

know um probably a healthy way to get

into programming and you know I love it

I think that’s an awesome story yeah as

a kid when you when you get a kid into

programming it’s like you need a

uh you you need some effort reward like

why am I doing this right what is the

aim of you know what writing this piece

of code what’s going to happen right

yeah so it was fun like um and actually

you ended up starting a website which

you can still find if you go to the way

out Wayback machine internet history

thing

um if you do I think it was converted to

converted in the number two.com and it

was a website in the late 90s about

writing game modifications nice

tutorials and stuff like that and that’s

how I started getting into actually

website design and learned HTML

JavaScript and all that kind of stuff

because

um it was like okay now we know how to

make these modifications we need to get

this information out there and like

people learn about it and share create a

community and it’s not that different

from open source right right building a

community of and you know that’s how I

started I really loved that um

interacting with with other people and

getting feedback and and I think that uh

with working on open source is kind of a

similar thing to that there but yeah I

think you hit on something really

important because I’m very similar uh in

order for me to really learn something

and get in deep with it I need a purpose

I need something I’m doing something I

care about and I think

um

I know like I do a lot of kids workshops

and

um

I know I see that like if there’s an end

result if there’s something that the

that they’re working toward they’re more

apt to get there right absolutely I mean

it’s one thing to sit in a classroom and

learn how to do a for Loop right that’s

so exciting I think that’s why I think

it’s like Minecraft are fantastic you

know because you you know kids can

see the reason for you know writing a

few

a script or you know learning Java to

you know program Minecraft mods or you

know that kind of thing right

um

so uh yeah I think when there is a

purpose

um and you know games are a great way to

to kind of get an entry into

why you would program and then you

realize there’s so many more ways to be

creative in you know in our industry

right there’s like lots of ways to be

creative and the programming is such a

creative activity you know people think

about programmers just like oh you know

fighting away in a keyboard but it’s

it’s really creative and um and a

rewarding you know activity to for

example with like things like Frank

Northern Grails to

um design apis like that other

developers are going to consume you know

that’s a creative Endeavor itself I

think there’s a lot of

um

I don’t know uh Artistry to designing a

good API you know and thinking about how

an API is works and yeah well and um

that’s a lot that’s a lot of fun

um

and

um yeah but I you know I also think that

as developers we need to unders also

think about how

other developers come to our products

you know so like working in open source

you realize you know you need good

documentation you need to write guides

you need to compete you need to be a

good writer you need to be a good you

know it’s not just programming right

exactly you often need to for technology

to be successful you probably need to

you know end up writing books about it

and so you know so you end up learning

all sorts of skills because you know

just to public speaking Yeah yeah

exactly so which I was I was terrified

of the first time I spoke oh in public

so yeah I can relate to you for sure

um I think I did my first one was Java

one in 2008. you know I was wow

terrified

that’s a big crowd too like that yeah

yeah but you uh you adapt and you learn

and you have fun you have fun with it

well and here we are years later at

devox Morocco yeah and I got the

privilege of going to your session it

was great I think a lot of people in

there learned a lot about micro knot and

gravian this is definitely something I’m

gonna go play with more I’m my

background is a lot of spring boots so

I’m curious about that one of the the

purposes of Micronaut was a uh to build

a better Spring right so um it’s a small

Arena spring that has compile time

checking and and a better development

experience for starting faster and so

forth so it has a lot taken a lot of

inspiration from spring so if you if you

from an API design perspective

um so if you uh if you’re used to if

you’re a Sprint developer and you’re

used to Spring Market is pretty

comfortable right awesome

well we used a lot of keywords here

today girl VM Micronaut spring Java of

course

Grails Ruby on Rails if you really yeah

interested in the inspiration if there’s

one resource that you’d like to leave

our audience with for something new for

them to go out and play with what would

it be well if you’re looking to learn

Micronaut or try out Micronaut for the

first time I would go to

guides.micronaut.io okay it is we have

so many guides you know from creating a

basic app and then compiling it into a

native image throughout the um two

guides on you know integrating with

cloud services and databases and you

know from basically beginner’s material

to and the cool thing about the guys is

each one of them comes with sample code

so you’re not like you can download the

app the sample app check out how it

works you know regardless uh of the your

build system preference so they have we

have great little even guides we we have

guides for also Java kotlin and groovy

so even if you like kotlin you’ve got

guys for Scotland users as well uh

groovy as well so cool there’s your

language preference great well I’m

certainly going to go check those out

um thank you Graham for interviewing

with us today and uh we’ll cross paths

again I’m sure at a future conference

yes thank you very much for the

interview thank you thanks