Azul Prime is Azul’s commercial high-performance Java platform distribution that includes several components including Azul Zing Builds of OpenJDK, an enhanced build of OpenJDK for superior application performance, responsiveness and efficiency.
Azul Prime also contains other key elements:
Azul Prime is priced per vCore on an annual basis. Pricing is also available for ISVs and manufacturers who want to embed/integrate Azul Prime with their products. Please find pricing details here.
Azul Prime is a highly optimized JVM and elastic runtime that breaks traditional Java scale barriers and provides applications with improvement in Java responsiveness, scale, and throughput.
With Azul Prime, Azul has created the most scalable JVM for enterprise workloads and made it available on cost-efficient commodity hardware. With Azul Prime, enterprises can now dramatically simplify Java deployments by using fewer instances while achieving greater response time consistency under load and dramatically lower operating costs.
Azul Prime eliminates “stop-the-world” garbage collection pauses that limit the scalability of other JVMs so that each Azul Zulu Prime JVM instance can scale to 20 TB. Azul Prime also utilizes highly optimized just-in-time (JIT) compilers and uses tiered compilation by default. Traditional Java warm-up issues are solved by Azul Prime’s ReadyNow technology that allows applications to start up fast and stay fast, allowing operations teams to save and reuse accumulated compiler optimizations between runs and avoiding de-optimization stalls that can slow down processing when workloads or conditions change. Every Azul Prime subscription also includes support for Flight Recorder and Zulu Mission Control — powerful open source profiling and performance monitoring and management software that includes ultra-low-overhead production-friendly performance data logging via built-in Flight Recorder technology.
Learn more: https://docs.azul.com/prime/what-to-expect
While Azul Prime is designed for use on servers, the minimum configuration is a Linux-based x86-64 and Arm64 processor. Prime will run with 1 GB of memory and 2 cores. MacOS an Windows are not supported at this time.
Learn more: https://docs.azul.com/prime/Sys-Reqs
Azul Prime Stream Builds are free for development, testing, and evaluation. Request a trial to learn more. You can see if your environment is supported by checking our specifications page. https://docs.azul.com/prime/Sys-Reqs
For access to stable builds in production, you will need Prime licenses. For on-site evaluation, it is best to work with an Azul Solutions Engineer to understand how your infrastructure can be positively impacted by Prime and help set up the JVM within the context of your use case. Simply contact us and we will respond as quickly as possible.
Learn more: https://docs.azul.com/prime/installation-and-configuration
For access to stable builds in production, you can order Azul Prime from an Azul representative, reseller partner, or by using a credit card. Contact us via email, phone (+1 650.230.6500), or web form.
Azul Prime uses Azul’s innovative ReadyNow technology to solve warm-up issues. Designed for low latency systems, ReadyNow allows Java applications to achieve optimum performance and consistency at startup and minimizes disruptive de-optimizations that can occur when load conditions change.
For other systems, consider the Azul Cloud Native Compiler, which as well as providing scalable functionality in cloud native environments, also helps outsource the heavy lifting of compilation during warm-up, helping you add performance at key times and right-size your compute and memory infrastructure across your JVMs.
Learn more: https://docs.azul.com/prime/analyzing-tuning-warmup
Falcon JIT compiler was developed to ensure that Java developers and Java-based businesses can extract maximum performance from today’s server hardware.
The Azul Cloud Native Compiler also provides a convenient and infrastructure-friendly option to outsource the process of JIT compilation.
The Falcon JIT compiler is based on technology from LLVM, the popular compiler infrastructure project with active involvement from leading universities and dozens of corporate contributors including Adobe, Apple, Google, NVIDIA, and Intel. For those familiar with mathematical programming languages, it also drives the increasingly popular technical computing language, Julia.
Yes. See benchmarks
Falcon works with applications built using Java SE 8 , Java SE 11 and Java 17.
No. Deploying Azul Prime requires no changes to existing applications. You merely point the application’s JAVA_HOME environment variable to Azul Prime and you are running on the most scalable JVM on the market. Azul Prime also requires no changes to other aspects of your infrastructure – security, other applications, monitoring tools, etc.
Azul Prime allows Java applications to utilize any amount of memory they need to execute, limited only by the physical memory in a system or the amount recognizable by the hypervisor. Because of Azul Prime unique garbage collector, based on Azul’s groundbreaking C4 (Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector) technology, GC pauses are independent of the size of the JVM heap and do not limit application scalability. In addition, Azul Prime includes a patented innovation of “memory pools” (i.e. memory reserves) that allows JVMs to dynamically grow its memory footprint based on real-time demand; when demand lessens, Azul Prime gives this memory back to the system. This memory reserve not only ensure consistent performance under heavy load, but it can act as the emergency memory for JVMs that encounter “memory leaks” due to bugs or coding errors.
Cloud Native Compiler provides additional forms of elasticity, on cloud and on-prem.
Azul is currently shipping Azul Prime for Java SE 17, 11, and 8.
Once Zulu Prime is installed on a system, invoking it is done just like any other JVM/JDK (i.e. by simply changing JAVA_HOME to point to the new JDK).
Azul Prime supports recent x86 versions of Linux distribution families, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Oracle Linux, Debian, and Amazon Linux. Review the Azul Prime system specifications for specific versions. Azul Prime also offers flexible Linux version support through an AutoBuild feature for its memory manager module.
ReadyNow is technology built into Azul Prime that solves Java warm-up problems for good. ReadyNow has two major features. First, it gives operations teams the ability to save and reuse compiler optimizations across runs. Second, ReadyNow offers developers robust APIs and compiler directives to pre-compile code that will be commonly used or methods that must be fast even though they are called infrequently.
Azul Prime uses the Azul C4 garbage collector by default. The C4 collector is continuously compacting regardless of heap size and never uses ‘stop-the-world’ pauses for garbage collection.
The C4 (Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector) is an updated generational implementation of the Azul Pauseless GC Algorithm and is the default collector of Azul Prime.
Yes. With fewer application instances, your database may see fewer connections and less contention.
Yes. For each release, we test a variety of application stacks (including Wildfly, Active MQ, Cassandra, WebLogic Server, JBoss, and Tomcat), as well as other open source software and 3rd party apps. Please contact us if you have a question about a particular application.
It’s simple — Azul Prime reduces Capex and Opex. You’ll need substantially less hardware or fewer cloud instances to meet your performance and scalability targets. As your business grows you can get more out of your existing capital investment — scaling up is less expensive than with any other Java runtime. Azul Prime also helps you meet your business objectives without re-engineering your existing systems. You’ll deliver a better customer experience, support more users on your existing infrastructure — and you’ll be able to deploy new features faster than your competition. Java applications are often business-critical and mission-critical. Performance and scalability issues that affect revenue and usage are often NOT due to the application, database or network but are more often related to the choice of JVM. By choosing Azul Prime, you can eliminate unexpectedly long wait times for users and out-of-memory crashes to capture lost revenue and customers and deliver a consistent user experience even when demand spikes unexpectedly.
Azul Prime eliminates long response time delays, inconsistent response times (aka response time outliers) and system crashes that can cause service level violations. You’ll spend less on re-engineering, re-architecting, and troubleshooting with Azul Prime — your applications will work the way they were envisioned, without JVM-related performance artifacts like jitter, stalls, and random pauses.
Because of memory and scalability limitations, conventional JVMs are not always a good fit for cloud- and SaaS-based services. Azul Prime is the best JVM for multi-tenant SaaS and cloud applications. Azul Prime allows more tenants to be run on a single instance, scales elastically as loads increase to prevent one tenant’s peak from affecting another tenant’s response times, and lets you support large customers without worrying about scalability.
Your Java-based application will run better – more scalable and with far lower peak latency – on Azul Prime as opposed to any other JVM. Azul Prime also makes deployments simpler, with fewer instances and less tuning; allows your customers more flexibility in deployment type, such as enterprise clouds or virtualized workloads; and provides always-on monitoring tools to optimize performance on production (running) systems.
Azul Prime is optimized for for Linux on x64 and Arm64 hardware favored by users of open source. Azul Prime improves the performance of your open source applications with orders of magnitude improvement in peak Java latency, scale, and throughput.
With Azul Prime, open source developers can stop worrying about GC, use whatever memory configuration is ideal for your application, and achieve greater response time consistency under highly variable workloads.
Through our free open source developer access program. Email us at [email protected] to request access, which is free (annual free subscriptions can be renewed annually) for Open Source committers. You can see if your preferred Linux distro is supported by checking our specifications page.
You will need the Azul open source agreement. When you download Azul Prime, you will accept this agreement as part of the process.
Commercial users of your open source project will need to purchase Azul Prime subscriptions from Azul. Please direct your users to call us at +1.650.230.6500, email us at [email protected] or use our web form to request assistance.
You may include Azul Prime with your open source project or commercial software. Your users or buyers will need a production license in order to deploy the software on Azul Prime.
