Microservices - Most Popular for Java Apps

March 3, 2022

10th annual survey from JRebel by Perforce finds 63% reporting an increase in microservice application start-up time

Perforce Software released of their 10th annual Java landscape survey — the 2022 Java Developer Productivity Report.

The report details the top Java development tools, technologies, and trends shaping the Java ecosystem — and tracks the impact of these emerging trends on overall developer productivity.

Among key findings from the survey, the report details the impact of microservices and CI/CD on Java application build, commit, and deploy times. Among CI/CD users, 42% of respondents reported a build completion time of over five minutes. For larger organizations, that rate climbed to 58%. With most respondents noting that they commit code over five times per day, that developer downtime can add up quickly.

“This report shows there is still friction for teams adopting microservices and CI/CD, namely the time wasted while waiting on redeploy and commit times.” said Rod Cope, CTO at Perforce Software. “This friction will be top of mind for organizations who want to improve the efficiency of their Java teams — especially as recruiting and retaining skilled talent becomes increasingly difficult in the next few years. From a developer perspective, organizations need to provide the tools developers want, or risk them finding an organization that will.”

The report also measures the continued impact of microservices on Java application deployment times. The survey found that over 61% of respondents had experienced an increase in the startup time for their microservice-based applications within the last 12 months, with 14% of those experiencing an over 50% increase.

Reported deployment times were significant, too, with 44% of microservices application users reporting redeploy times of over five minutes per redeploy.

“Adopting a microservices architecture has a host of benefits for Java applications, but developer productivity is a concern without the right tools in place,” said Curtis Johnson, Product Manager at JRebel by Perforce. “With so many companies noting an increase in startup times for their microservices applications, this survey clearly shows the necessity of a tool like JRebel that can bypass that process entirely — regardless of whether the application is monolithic or microservice-based.”