Retail engineering leaders face intense performance demands. Azul Platform Prime helps retailers exceed customer expectations while reducing infrastructure costs.
Modern retail’s relentless demands
Online shoppers don’t wait. Whether they’re checking out during a flash sale or browsing late-night deals on their phones, they expect instant page loads, seamless recommendations, and zero hiccups from cart to confirmation. For cloud architects and engineering leads, delivering always-on, real-time experiences is both a technical and economic challenge.
Retail and e-commerce platforms must scale instantly during traffic surges, maintain millisecond response times, and stay cost-effective under growing infrastructure loads. Traditional Java runtimes often struggle to keep up with these dynamic, high-throughput environments. That’s where Azul Platform Prime comes in.
Why Java performance matters in retail
Java is the backbone of many e-commerce systems. From inventory systems to payment gateways, recommendation engines to search, retail platforms rely on Java’s stability and scalability. But out-of-the-box OpenJDK runtimes often introduce performance bottlenecks that cause customers to abandon their shopping carts and take their spending money with them.
Retailers face three key Java-related challenges:
- Latency during peak traffic: JVM warmup and garbage collection can introduce unpredictable pauses and startup delays. A secure and high-performance Java platform is critical for online fraud detection. E-Commerce fraud is expected to exceed $107 billion in 2029
- Underutilized infrastructure: Performance inefficiencies mean provisioning more compute just to maintain SLAs. 71% of organizations have more than 20% of unutilized cloud compute capacity that they pay for.
- Inconsistent user experience: Shoppers demand fast, responsive apps — any performance degradation hurts conversion rates and brand perception. 71% want generative AI integrated into their shopping experiences.
Java performance isn’t just a backend concern. It’s a revenue multiplier. That’s why modern retailers are turning to high-performance JVMs to solve these issues at the platform level.
Azul Platform Prime: built for e-commerce agility
Azul Platform Prime is built on OpenJDK, but it delivers industry-leading performance for Java-based applications — without requiring code changes.
Platform Prime transforms how retail systems behave under load:
- C4 Garbage Collector: Eliminates stop-the-world pauses, allowing applications to process more transactions with higher consistency.
- ReadyNow: Solves the warmup problem by maintaining optimized JVM profiles so new instances come online at peak performance—critical during flash sales or holiday spikes.
- Cloud Native Compiler: Offloads Just-in-Time compilation, freeing up compute and reducing latency across services.
- Falcon JIT Compiler: Uses advanced LLVM-based optimizations to speed up time-to-optimal performance for every Java app.
The result? Platform Prime enables retail platforms to:
- Improve throughput by 2–5x
- Reduce cloud infrastructure costs by 20% or more
- Deliver consistent, low-latency experiences—even at scale
Real-world retail results
The eBook Unlock Java Performance for Retail Applications highlights real retail outcomes: one major e-commerce provider doubled their capacity using the same cloud footprint, and another improved their response times by over 40%.
These improvements go beyond infrastructure savings. They directly enhance the shopper experience and help engineering teams meet aggressive SLAs—especially during high-stakes shopping events.
A platform for performance-driven engineering leaders
For cloud architects and engineering directors, the challenge isn’t just “make it fast.” It’s “make it fast, reliable, and cost-efficient at scale.” Azul Platform Prime delivers on all three fronts. It eliminates trade-offs between responsiveness and cost so teams can innovate on features instead of firefighting performance issues.
In today’s competitive retail landscape, milliseconds matter—and Platform Prime helps you win every one of them.
Ready to prime your retail platform?
Learn how you can accelerate performance, control costs, and keep shoppers happy—no code changes required.
