FLOSS Weekly 715 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Doc Searls (00:00:00):
This is Floss Weekly. I'm Doc Searls. This week, Jonathan Bennett and I talk with Alex Belokrylov, of Bell Soft. They have this stream that starts with their Libera JDK and moves through Al Paquita Linux. That's their, their LINUX distribution or Java on clouds, which does a lot on clouds. You may not know. Very, very flexible. Very interesting. And that is coming up next.

Jonathan Bennett (00:00:32):
Love from people you trust.

Announcer (00:00:36):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT

Doc Searls (00:00:39):
This is Floss Weekly episode 715. Recorded Wednesday, January 18th, 2023. Lower cloud costs for Java. This episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by Kolide. That's Kolide with a k Kolide is an endpoint security solution that gives it teams a single dashboard for all devices, regardless of their operating system. Visit Kolide.com/floss to learn more and activate a free 14 day trial today. No credit card required. Hello again, everyone everywhere. I am Doug Surles. This is Floss Weekly. And welcome back. I have Jonathan Bennett on the show this week.

Jonathan Bennett (00:01:24):
Hey, doc. Yeah, he is. Yeah, it's good to be here.

Doc Searls (00:01:27):
Oh, he is good. <Laugh> that I heard our director jumping in, but you sound too much like him, I think. Which

Jonathan Bennett (00:01:33):
Oh oh. That's not necessarily a good thing. <Laugh>.

Doc Searls (00:01:36):
How, I mean, I, I I'm more used to hearing about weather problems where you live cuz they're tornadoes and big storms and sometimes earthquakes.

Jonathan Bennett (00:01:44):
But, and our weather here has been boring for like a month and a half. <Laugh>.

Doc Searls (00:01:48):
Ours has been rock and roll, more rock because the, and rocks that rolled it, we had like 20 some inches of rain, which is more that we get in like a whole winter. California has two, two sig two seasons. Fire and rain. Yeah. Nine months a year. It's fire. Two months this rain. And we had monster rains. Lots of lots of roads are out still. People are isolated in the mountains and stuff. And the internet was in and out, so, so we, you know, I had to deal with ro robots at the, at the I S P and then there were trucks on the street yesterday. But we're good now.

Jonathan Bennett (00:02:21):
You mean you don't have a sterling system yet that you could just pop out in your

Doc Searls (00:02:25):
Backyard, <laugh>? No. Well, the problem is, is you, any, as you and probably listeners and viewers know I live in at least three places, <laugh>. And so having, having, you know, generator backup or something like that is not, not is too complicated. So it just, yeah. User view somewhere.

Jonathan Bennett (00:02:42):
It's, it's hard to fit a generator in your suitcase.

Doc Searls (00:02:45):
<Laugh>. That's true. What, what, what have you got there? <Laugh>, you know, and why

Jonathan Bennett (00:02:50):
<Laugh>?

Doc Searls (00:02:51):
Someday, I'll tell you this story about trying to transport a, an electric bike across the country and being told I had to take out the lithium battery and carry it on my person, <laugh>. That was, that was the least of it, actually. Yeah. So, so to to to hurry along you are you familiar with our, our guest or

Jonathan Bennett (00:03:09):
Our, I've learned company learned. I've learned a little bit about it over the last couple of days doing prep for the show. I am familiar with the idea of, of, of course, Java. I think everyone has touched, everyone in our profession has touched Java to some extent or another. Some people have embraced it and some people have tried to keep it at arm's length as much as possible. But we've all had to do something with it. I believe. I have covered the idea of Java on the server running web apps from a security perspective from time to time and all of the things that that implies. So I'm, I am adjacent to being familiar with what he does.

Doc Searls (00:03:47):
<Laugh> Well, you're, you're, you're my adjacency tool. I'm, as I, I always have to disclaimer, I'm not, I've never been a programmer, I've always been a journalist. I've covered this stuff. It's kind of like the, the ballplayer who doesn't do the sport, but covers it, has covered it all his life. So, anyway, so I, I wanna jump into it. Our guest is AlexBelokrylov, I hope I have that right, as the c e o and founder of BiSoft, the company behind labia. And I may have mispronounced that J jdk his Java journey started at Sun Microsystems, as so many others did, and was followed by his Oracle experience. I wanna hear the difference between employment and experience. That'd be interesting. And which helped to establish Alexander as one of the most influential Java thinkers and a significant contributor to Java's evolution in adoption. So welcome to the show, Alex. There you are.

Alex Belokrylov  (00:04:42):
Thank you. Thank you Doc for the introduction. Yeah. The name of the distribution, what we delivers to the community and our happy customers is Libera, gk,

Doc Searls (00:04:53):
Libera, Libera,

Alex Belokrylov  (00:04:54):
Libera, Liber. It's that we, we want to use some connotation to free and liberty. So it's, and, and, and to coffee too.

Doc Searls (00:05:09):
<Laugh>. I know. It's, it's complicated cuz it it guessing at pronunciation and English, we tend to emphasize the first syllable in French. They tend to emphasize the last syllable in different Latin languages. The, it's the middle syllable, it's so, so where are you located? Alex

Alex Belokrylov  (00:05:28):
Like the, the we headquarters in, in San has, but the developers all around the world has in any open source companies. I'm currently traveling. I'm in Kazakhstan with some part of our team here.

Doc Searls (00:05:43):
You're in Kazakh Star right now?

Alex Belokrylov  (00:05:44):
Yeah. Oh,

Doc Searls (00:05:45):
Wow. It is late. It is late with yours. Sorry about

Alex Belokrylov  (00:05:48):
That, <laugh>. It is, it's

Doc Searls (00:05:50):
Either that or very early.

Alex Belokrylov  (00:05:51):
I, I got used to it anyway, any, anyway, I need to connect with my team in, I know. I, California,

Doc Searls (00:05:58):
It's, it's always interesting to me that people in in, in, say in, in Europe, you know, very careful, like it's their evening there. But for people who are in India, Kazakhstan Chinese that are basically 12 or near 12 off, cuz India's a half hour off the rest of the world are, they're, they're fine being up in the middle of the night <laugh>. I guess it's just an occupational necessity

Alex Belokrylov  (00:06:23):
Since Yeah, when we started Go ahead. Sorry. We're working with all around the world and like Australia the United States, Europe, middle East, all has different, different time zones. And your working day is a mess. Now you, you, it's, it's endless. And it's, it's never starts, never ends

Doc Searls (00:06:46):
<Laugh>. No escape. No escape. The phone rings at any time. So, so so tell us about your own journey there. What got you from Sun, and I'm sure working with Java's Sun, which really began to Oracle, which ate sun to your own independent path at this point.

Alex Belokrylov  (00:07:08):
That is, that is right. That's right. Yeah. I started my journey in IT industry back in nineties. At that time, there was the beginning of the open source, I would say. So we had many proprietary Linux distribution, not Linux, Unix distributions. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And today, I, I recently read the use about IBM M ix. So this is the only a live proprietary Unix distribution as I know. And IBM decided to move their engineer's position to India now for a ix. So Solaris and, and the maintenance and H PX is, and maintenance and what will happen with I B M ix. We'll see. And it was, it was very exciting time. And I joined Sun Microsystems. I was so pleased to work with the company behind Solaris and Java was raised, WA was, was raising that time.

(00:08:18):
And I I joined as an engineer in Java organizations. And several, like five years later sun started a very exciting program. It's called some Campus Ambassadors. Sun was always about students and the community as you remember. And I, I took the position of the lead of emea EMEA program lead. And this program was about hiring students within the university and trained them on some technologies on Solaris, Java and Net Dean and encouraged them to share their knowledge among fellow students. So we we hired a lot of them. And even in emea, we had more than a hundred students at that time. And I had a very interesting, interesting story of hiring. Then I received lots of cvs and I was hiring in Middle East, don't remember the exact country, but I received cv, saw that the CV is a very good feat for our program.

(00:09:42):
And I asked the candidate for the phone interview and I wasn't able to recognize that it's a girl's name, a female name there, and go was on the other side and she was amazing. I said, yeah, and, and at that time there wasn't so many so many girls in, in the IT industry. And I said, that's okay. I'm really happy with your experience and what, what you do. And I would like to, I would like to bring you on board to the program. And she said, yeah, everything is is good. I'm happy to however I need to warn you that I'm only able to do presentations to a women audience. So I I not capable to speak for, for men. I said, that's okay, <laugh>. So, so fi Finally, finally, she joined the program.

(00:10:47):
But that, that, that was very interesting how culture is different and that I even couldn't imagine that such thing could happen. This, this, this was a very good time. So many cultures, so many countries around, and very nice. So I had a lots of fun with that. And after that, I meet and I'm still meeting these, like my, my campus ambassadors at different companies. And even a couple months ago, maybe at the end of the last year in Amsterdam, I met one of them at customers meetings. That's amazing. <Laugh>. <laugh>. So yeah. Then Oracle acquired son and Oracle was not so happy to spend money on students. They both <laugh> count in money very well. And we decided to to stop St. Camp's ambassador program and some paid students actually for that. And however, Oracle was very interested to, to became a steward of Java to say to the community that everything okay, and we will be taken care of Java very carefully.

(00:12:06):
And they started their growing their Java evangelism team. And I moved to that group and worked at Java Evangelist did like the presentations, wrote materials, organized the communities at different places as I already had the connections there. And during that time, I had a very close connection with the product team, Java product team. And finally we had an open position and I joined product management team at Java Organization as principal product manager. And I've been working there for six years. So my focus area was Java for embedded platforms for the last several years. And we actually created Java for arm processors, like reported it there, reported Java for black power pc hardware. And Java became at least like it started to became, and the technology for the embedded platforms know, know, all people know that Blu-ray technology based on Java.

(00:13:22):
So at the back of every Blu-ray player there is a Java logo. So this is this is interesting fact how time was going. And Oracle was changing from product company to a service company, like every, every big company wanna be a player on cloud markets and Oracle is not an exception here. And they decided not to continue this Java embedded play. And I moved to an I U T cloud service as a product manager. However, I was still in touch with the customers who use Java for embedded purpose. And they was really surprised and Oracle and announced that we will not be any other releases beyond JDK eight for embedded platforms. So nobody was happy about that. And the community said like they're our Java for Raspberry Pi, the new version for Raspberry Pi. And together with my colleagues fellow colleagues, we decided to, to start Bells oft in thousand 17.

(00:14:44):
And our initial focus was Java for embedded open JDK for embedded use. And we started to invest our, our time and efforts and our knowledge into this direction, this area. And during the first year of the company existence we worked on a arch 64. These are import for 64 bid processors specifically servers. And during the first year of the company existence, we became one of top five open GK contributors, top five like project contributors among such big names as Oracle, red Hat, sap, and Google, some unknown company from, from the last year became there. And I realized why I B M acquired red Hat that time to catch up like to pass POF on this chart, <laugh> <laugh>.

(00:15:56):
And yeah, we were making Java. And at that time we created our open GK based distribution labor JK for ARM platforms. And we made the community happy to provide them the JDK nine for Raspberry PIs. And Raspberry Pi was pretty popular platform at that time, and I still have a pile of them at my apartment. Like kids were, kids were <laugh> the playing with them. And what's next? The next we, we brought we brought a lot of formance optimizations for the arm port for the open jk. Open GK is evolving by the specific process Java enhancement process. We brought one of these enhancements into the open jk, and you probably remember that at that time in thousand 18, Oracle and non changes in Java release curtains like open release cadence.

(00:17:15):
And what's more important, Oracle made Java commercial product. Oracle started to ask the subscription to, from organizations to allow them to use Java in production. And many organizations was not happy that for 20 years they received Java for free with all the its updates, security, and functionality. And now at one D, it's became some black commercial product with in some cases like millions of dollars subscription fee per year. And this created a big market for Oracle and makes many, many Oracle customers unhappy. So at that time, a non open g DK distributions appeared, and Bells oft Libera was just in time for that. So we quickly supported the widest range of platforms added obviously like Windows and Linux 64 and 32 beats into our portfolio added Solaris and edited Power PC there. Because we already had the experience on those platforms, it was pretty easy for us.

(00:18:41):
 And we we, we started to provide the agility for anybody. And we started to sell commercial support for that. And very quickly, we were able to bring a couple very well known customers from ISVs. One of them was pivotal. Pivotal is the company packed Sprint framework. It was acquired by VMware in thousand 20, and now VMware became our customer. And another one is very well known developer Tools is JetBrains is the company which almost every Java developer know and has their tools on their laptop, desktop. And JetBrains actually is itself, JetBrains products itself is Java applications, which need runtime to to function. And Besot supports this runtime, which inside jet Brains product. So yeah moving forward to the

Jonathan Bennett (00:20:02):
<Laugh>,

Alex Belokrylov  (00:20:03):
Yeah, to the, to the, to the open gk distribution. And we were seeing some requirements from our customers yet. And of course, like VMware and Gen Brains is not the only, the only user's Bell Soft as, as we see well already used by almost like 3% of Java around the world by several, several reports.

Jonathan Bennett (00:20:30):
I, I find it interesting that I've already used Bells Soft software, and I didn't know it because I, I used some Jet Brainin stuff for doing Android development. And so, you know, the, the actual Android studio is just a repackage of Jet Brain. So, hey, I'm a customer too, I suppose, sort of. And then you talked about, that's right, you talked about your handful of raspberry pies. Well, I too have a handful of raspberry pies back on my desk. I think I have about 10 of them here, not counting the ones actually in use. So we are <laugh>, we are in, in we, we are brothers in this <laugh>. I wanted to, I wanted to jump in and ask you, you've done a great job with the history, but I'd love to get some more details about a few things. And the first one I wanna start with is, what exactly is the difference between Open JDK and Libera jdk? Because I know when I go to install Java on say, my Lennox Distro, so let's just say Fedora it grabs open JD K and I'm curious with, with Oracle kind of having dropped some support for that. Are we actually pulling you guys' code and just using the same name? What's, what's kind of the story between those two?

Alex Belokrylov  (00:21:39):
Yeah. Every every Open JDK distribution provider brings something, something special into that. And of course, Libera JK has the differentiators in general for for lts versions for JK eight, JK 11, JK 17, we are, we provide the Vanilla Open gk. So everything we do, we contribute into the open GK and then build Libera GK based on the open GD K source code. And however, we provide free flavors of our distributions. So we provide stand full standard and light versions of Libera. Gq full version includes some additional libraries some additional functionalities like minimal dm Java fx, some additional APIs. So almost everything what we considered as the production ready for for our users. Standard one is the vanilla open G key, but almost any other distribution provider provides and light version is the version of open GD key, specifically optimized for containerized use.

(00:23:12):
So it's optimized in site and has number of relevant back ports, which allows that to save the resources. That's actually the part of our offering for, for the containers. And besides that, this is about lts versions. Besides that, we also provide support for the legacy versions of of Java j K six and JK seven. You would be surprised that enterprises, they are looking forward to move to Clouds, to Kubernetes and to, to run microservices applications. And at the same time, they said, we have many, many applications, which requires JK six, and we are not going to migrate them. So can you guys provide us safe and secured version of JK six together with your awesome and amazing effective solution for the cloud? That's their reality. So so I would say that Libera, GK and Besso provides the only distribution open GK based distribution, which covers everything. So I would say we cover legacy parts GK six G DK seven support. We provide lts versions supported, and also in addition, we provide the distribution of gra VM called Lika Native Image Kit. I will elaborate on that at, at the, at the parts of, of, yeah, our, of the native compilation.

Doc Searls (00:25:05):
Well, I, I look forward to your elaboration, actually. In the meantime, I have to <laugh> open the right tab <laugh> on my computer. Let everybody know that this episode of Floss Weekly is brought to you by Kolide, that's Kolided with a K You know, the old saying, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Well, the traditional approach to device security is that hammer a blunt instrument that can't solve nuanced problems, even after installing clunky agents that users hate it. Teams still have to deal with mountains of support tickets over the same old issues, and they have no way to address things like unencrypted, SSH keys, OS updates, or pretty much anything going on with a Linux device. Kolide is an endpoint security solution that's more like a Swiss Army knife. It gives it teams a single dashboard for all devices, Mac, windows, and even Linux. You can query your entire fleet to check for common compliance issues or write your own custom checks. Plus, instead of installing intrusive software that creates more work for it, Kolides lightweight agent shows end users how to fix issues themselves. You can achieve endpoint compliance by adding a new tool to your toolbox. Visit Kolide.com/floss to find out how. That's K O L I D e.com/floss.

(00:26:35):
So Alex, you were saying <laugh>, you wanted to continue with, with what you were saying at that point? You you wanna pick that up?

Alex Belokrylov  (00:26:42):
Yeah, sure. So I stayed, yeah, I stayed with the unique proposition from Libera and Bells of Distribution. So we provide the the most complete Java experience. That's how I would say that. So we provide legacy versions of Java. We provide lts versions of Java, and we provide the future of Java is the native image based on gravity and projects and everything we do, we do open source. We,

Jonathan Bennett (00:27:24):
I'm, I'm curious, we'll jump back in. I'm curious about the the Libera native image kit. Is this, is this running <laugh>, is this running Java on bare metal without a Linux distro underneath it?

Alex Belokrylov  (00:27:39):
Not really. Not really <laugh>. It's still, it's still re re requires the Linux distro. It's, it can, it can run on the Distros Linux, so Okay. To yeah, the native image is capable to embed Muscle Library inside the image.

Jonathan Bennett (00:27:58):
So it's,

Alex Belokrylov  (00:27:58):
It's essentially, it's still requires

Jonathan Bennett (00:28:00):
It, it's essentially an embedded Linux distro. Something like well, the one I'm familiar with that comes to mind is it's gonna be something like open, W r t the, the kind of Linux that you would put on a router. And then you guys have, have put Libera JDK inside of that.

Alex Belokrylov  (00:28:16):
No, no, no. I need, I need to elaborate. No, no. <Laugh>, yeah. This, this is different story. This Libera, native Filmage kit is the pro, is the set of tools which allows to compile Java into a native executable. So,

Jonathan Bennett (00:28:35):
Oh,

Alex Belokrylov  (00:28:35):
Okay. Then, then you run Java. You, you need the whole g rre Java runtime environment in which includes the core libraries and virtual machine. And with GRA vm, you don't need any of that. You compile your Java code into the native executable and run that, and it provides lots of benefits for the cloud use. It's almost immediate startup, very low latency. So it can be used in Lambda, like any other native application lower, much lower memory consumption, also, in many cases a bit better performance. However, it has some trade offs, of course, you need to pay for that

Jonathan Bennett (00:29:30):
<Laugh>. Well, that's fair. People have to pay for something, right? You guys, you guys have to make a little bit of money, <laugh>.

Alex Belokrylov  (00:29:38):
No, no, no. It's not, not about money. You, you have to pay to that. Your engineering time. You need to refactor your Java code, right? And adopt that to be able to compile into the native, because it doesn't support number of features, which are pretty standard for, for Java run time reflection, for example, or runtime code generation. Everything must be done during compiled time. And then the image actually, it's, it's not changeable.

Jonathan Bennett (00:30:12):
Yeah, that makes sense. So first off, we have a, we have a comment from our Discord chat room. David Ruggles says, jet Brains. I'm a Python developer, not Java, but I love Jet Brains <laugh>. So you guys get a lot of, so I, I made this joke that you know, in fact, I put a little more strongly in the Discord before the show, Java is a love it or hate it kind of language. Some people just absolutely fall in love with it, and some of us just really don't wanna do, have anything to do with it. But I think there's, there's maybe some love for you guys, even among those of us that really don't like Java, because your stuff pops up in a lot of different places. So for that Thank you, <laugh>,

Alex Belokrylov  (00:30:52):
That is right.

Jonathan Bennett (00:30:53):
Yeah. And, and then, so let's, let's talk a little bit about about how is this pronounced? Al Paquita? Al Paquita Linnux?

Alex Belokrylov  (00:31:02):
Is that Al Paquita? I was close. This this is right. This is right.

Jonathan Bennett (00:31:06):
Yeah. So what's the story there? What does that let someone do?

Alex Belokrylov  (00:31:10):
It's, it's very, let's, let's start with with the naming <laugh>. Okay. Yeah. I, I, I did didn't talk a a bit about our contributions to Open JDK and to gra We there was, there was a project within Open JDK for many years, like Oracle engineer Michael Whitit started that the project called per And it's aim was to bring support of Alpine Linux into the open GD K because Alpine used the muscle Lepsy standards library not lepsy as other distributions and muscle wasn't supported by the open jdk mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And we created Luca JDK Muscle Base a while ago, and use that. And during that time, we prepared the Portola project to be the part of the open GK upstream. And at GK 16, we integrated Portola project into the upstream of open gd K.

(00:32:17):
And now Alpine is the first class citizen within open jd. K, so it's supported platform. Then we, when we did the same for gra, so made Alpine as the part of gra and during that play, because we've found Alpine a perfect distribution for the containers because we created containers for Libera light distribution and delivered that to our customers who run their spring boot applications in, in cloud and containerized environment. And during that time, we identified some areas which, which need to be improved on Linux site, not on Java site. We, like, we, we, we were able to do everything with our distribution because it was our distributions. And finally, we understood that the creation, the Lenox distributions with optimization targets for the Java workload, that's reasonable. And that's what they actually did. So why is [inaudible] the naming was it's it's always very hard. Yes. And, and the project,

Jonathan Bennett (00:33:40):
Project names are like email addresses. All the good ones are taken <laugh>.

Alex Belokrylov  (00:33:45):
Absolutely. And it was our case actually. So we, we decided to name our Linux distribution, Al Paquita no, Al Paquita. Initially it was Alpaca alpaca our animals lives in, in South America mountains. And they are very cute <laugh>. And we saw that, yeah, alpaca lives in mountains. Alpine is the mountains nice connotations. So let's do that. And it's funny, <laugh> looks, it looks funny. And we, we decided to do that. Created everything called, already named our packages. And then we started to pass through legal due diligence. And legal guys said to us that this trademark already taken. And they strongly suggested us not to move forward with alpaca. So we played around and found Al Paquita in Spanish. That's called like, kind of alpaca kit. And we decided why not, it's even more cute than, than Alpaca.

(00:34:59):
And now we have Al Paquita Linux and Al Paquita cloud native platform. So alpaca Linux is Alpine based, but with some additional additional optimizations, what we put inside first of all, we did some balance. We, we, we, we, we put some balance kernel option configurations. We enabled pneuma non uniform memory access with Puma Award scheduler. We enable task group support and we enabled budget Fair qin with some other additional features that's about the NEL and Al Paquita based on the lts Cardinal five to 10 on the lipsy side we did the biggest part of, of, of our work actually. And we decided that our distribution will create free standard libraries will provide Alta with standard Muscle Library. And we also add our muscle perf, so muscle, which performs good with Chava.

(00:36:35):
Sure. And we, we put like optimization options. We add minus oh two and minus, so three for different subsystems of muscle perf. On the other side, Alpine only use minus os, which allows optimizations for size. And BiSoft muscle supports indirect functions, which allows to use different implementations of functions for the specific platform for this specific processor. And muscle peripheral supports various CPU u specific asthma functions. In addition to benefit from from new CPU instructions, operations operating system must be able to discover them and muscle perf internally implement CPU U feature discovering also. And the third part is glissy. Glissy is the part of ator distribution. Also because many many users, as we see we depend on glisi and we, we cannot just quickly migrate to muscle because on the native side, we have dependencies to glissy, however, they use Java, and they run Java applications.

(00:38:10):
So we provide the flexibility to, to our users with different different lipsy implementations. And in addition to extend that flexible, even, even wider, we provided free memory allocators there, like R pma, look, log and Gmail look for different workloads. They all have, may all have trade-offs, of course, and there is no a silver bullet for any use cases. But if, if that, that's possible to, to play with different one and find the most optimal one for this specific workload, that's always good. And we found that useful for us. And Al Paquita also has some security hardening. Sure. So we implemented at the kernel lockdown to prevent direct and indirect access to the running kernel image. We implemented, we support the secure booth, and we support NEL module sign in B F S ak five 12. We are about to provide security advisory to our users and customers. And of course, 24 by seven support is always valuable.

Jonathan Bennett (00:39:33):
Yes, <laugh>. So, I'm, I'm curious it sounds like a lot of the things that are going on in Al Paquita, not, not to oversimplify it, but a lot of it is tuning for Java specific workloads. And I'm curious, would, does anyone do a Docker image that uses Al Paquita as kind of the, the distro running inside Docker? It almost sounds like you could I don't know, maybe have a Red Hat server where Red Hat runs in the bare metal and then use Docker and an Al Paquita image to run your individual Java workloads. Does that, does that make sense at all? Is that something that people are doing?

Alex Belokrylov  (00:40:10):
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That makes sense because just using Al Paquita instead of the standards open g DK container with <inaudible> or bread hat can bring a lot of memory savings. So with with Al Paquita, with Li Light, we were able to see the amazing results actually for GK 11, which is the most popular G D K distribution. Now we see memory saving capital 40% on spring boot applications on spring applications. And Sprint is the most popular the most popular framework for Java among Java developers. So 40% memory savings is a lot. And Al Paquita has also a better startup time than the other Linux distributions. We actually have the, a good article about performance measurements of Al Paquita and comparison that to the other to the other containers with the open jdk and our block block.

(00:41:24):
And yes, this this, like everything we did finally brought us a very good boost and, and memory consumption. And what, what does that mean? Then you capable to save, to save memory, then you for, for memory bound services, that means that for like in Kubernetes, if you have many services, you can use two times smaller ports and using two times smaller ports on the scale can bring to savings. Lots of nodes in Kubernetes and nodes equal to, to, to, to money <laugh>, to to cost. That's, that's it. That's, that's what we promoting now. And al Paquita stream containers with Liber lights are free and freely available from be oft Dock Hub. Anybody could get that and use it wherever we we want in production or anyway, and get immediate benefits from, from savings. We are not claiming that that could bring a lot of benefits for other technologies. We only say that we are assured that for Java applications, specifically for Spring, spring boot applications, that will bring you value. However, I would be really happy to hear any feedback from other technologies like Al Paquita is available as standalone base image, and who knows, maybe for Python it works even better.

Doc Searls (00:43:14):
Well, what I get is, so some more questions about those kind of things plus deployment, how you make money, bunch of stuff like that. But then first have to let everybody know it's time for the TWI audience survey. The annual survey helps us understand our audience so we can make your listening experience even better. It only takes a few minutes to complete. Please do it. Go to go take this last sentence. Go to twit TV slash survey 23 to take it. Don't wait. The last day to take the survey is January 31st. And thank you for doing that. So, so Alex, it, it seems to me that we look at the world of clouds, they're a zillion different kinds doing lots of different kinds of workload. You're watching them when you look at your tv, they're pretty much all the websites you go into now or in some kind of cloud. Everybody's email is in a cloud. What, what kind, I mean, what do, what do you see in deployment that either Al Al Paquito Linux and your upstream forms of enablement make possible versus what's going on in cloud in general? Cuz you must have a real perspective on that.

Alex Belokrylov  (00:44:34):
I could <laugh> I could elaborate on the Java side, what's going on there, but that's fine. I, yeah. What, what I see is that Java is not perfect technology for the cloud. And there are many competitors for Java, which claims that they are much smaller. But you could run faster, start start faster, save memory. However, I would consider Java as a Swiss knife. Java has everything inside. You need security, security already inside Java. You need the synchronous input output. It's inside. And you just select what, what you need. Other technologies, yes, they, they might like start instantly and they are small. However, then you go to the same functionality that, but Java provides, you will came to very similar, similar results and consumptions. And I see that what we can do with Java is to make it specifically for the, for the tasks.

(00:45:51):
So not to make it as Swiss knife for everything, but to decouple it out of some part of that. And this technology already inside Java like Java users, Java developers already can make on the part of the runtime for their specific applications. But we can go further also. And gra vm, the native compilation is I think the future of Java. So then Java code compiled it to the native executable with all the parts of G dk, which requires for this particular applications. And we see that there are already number of frameworks in this area. And spring is the most popular recently VMware announced spring spring six, spring framework six, which has sprint native insight. And this capable to be compiled into the native and run as a native executable.

(00:47:00):
And I think this is for, for Java site is the near future, I would say. And the technology will gain popularity in one, two years. Of course, this is for, for the new applications. Nobody would be happy to rewrite some or even start to factoring. And I think that scale JK six will leave for, I don't know, for 10 years, definitely, because now the within open G D K we committed to support G D K eight until thousand 30, and we see that many customers are not going to move out of that, and they will continue using that. So in terms of, of the cloud side, the native compilation of Java code definitely be the next mainstream from, from my point of view.

Doc Searls (00:48:06):
It's, it's interesting to me that I was trying to look back at when it started, when Java started. It may have been, was it back when they were doing Spark and Sun was doing Spark? I think so. I, I was working with Sun at that time as a outside contractor. But when Java came along, the whole idea was that it would be machine independent and and we're way above the machine at this point. So it's like looking at the future and where Java's going now and actually contrasting it from what, you know, James Gosling wanted it to be back on day one. It's sort of an interesting exercise, I think. So where do you see it going? And Yeah, go ahead. Sorry.

Alex Belokrylov  (00:48:47):
Yeah, that, that, that is it. So Java is the universal universal technology, which by, by packaging inside the container, it can be then executed in any, any cloud, right? You have packaged your application inside the, the set of containers and then deploy to the cloud base Kubernetes. And it, it runs there smoothly and you don't think about what's inside, whether that's which, which kind of Linux there, why, why should you care? It will just run. That's not about native executable. Now you need to know exactly what architecture you will be running your applications.

Doc Searls (00:49:39):
So, so tell me about your, your own business model. You have like lots of companies, you have free and open stuff that you, that you provide people, but what, what is, what is your business then? What is Wellsoft? How does it make a living? How do you make a living with that?

Alex Belokrylov  (00:49:54):
Sure, sure. Yeah, developers need to eat too

Doc Searls (00:49:58):
<Laugh>. So

Alex Belokrylov  (00:50:01):
We, we, of course, we, we are geeks and we're really happy about what we we do. But yeah, business businesses, business we provide technical support for the open jdk. This is our main line for kind of our classical business. And our differentiator here is that we are among a leading contributors and we are independent company and everything we do for our customers became the part of the open g d project. So we don't have some internal hidden repository where we put all patches for our customers, and then we bind them to like lock them to, to Besot. Liber no was said like, you are our customer. You have a bulk, you have an issue, will will fix it for you. And it will became the part of any other opportu distribution. So you are free to go to our competitors if you want, if you don't value our white glove treatment, you can go to anybody else.

(00:51:07):
And we have very happy customers who had been, had been, had received support from other organizations, and they said, <inaudible> is amazing, <laugh>, we are really happy to be, to be such guys. And yeah, we were able to bring such a big ISV switch can do it themselves, but they trust us and they relies on us and relies on Libera jk on that. And so that's about Libera jk Libera JK is free wherever. And we, we, we, we sell technical support. We're monetize and by selling technical support for that for Al Paquita, we provide al Paquita stream containers. This is the Al Paquita stream, which has a six month support lifecycle with Leber Light inside. And in addition, we have a commercial product called Al Paquita Cloud Native platform. This cloud native platform includes Al Paquita Enterprise lenux with lts support like four years. Support Lifecycle has liite insight with some additional additional optimizations features and additional integrations with APMs. And as the part of the offering. It also includes the support for Liber native image kit with extended set of extended set of like monitoring events. So we, we are selling l t s versions of our freely available products, but we're still open source, obviously.

Jonathan Bennett (00:53:13):
Yeah, that makes sense. So I, I'm curious, do you see a future for Bells soft that is bigger than Java? Do you have other aspirations or things coming down the pike that are maybe Linux and open source software related?

Alex Belokrylov  (00:53:29):
Well see, of course. However, our primary focus, at least for now, is to make Java, to keep Java the number one choice for the modern enterprises, because modern enterprises started to look round for other technologies and considered Java as the not the ideal to them. So we are here to eliminate that tops and assure them that choosing Java is the right way for like coming 10 years, and that's what we truly believe in.

Jonathan Bennett (00:54:09):
Yeah, makes sense. I I, I'm just about to hand it back over to Doc. I think it's getting close to time to wrap, but there's a question I like to ask people, and it seems like this could be a good one here too. What is the weirdest or most impressive, or just most surprising thing that you've seen someone do with your platform? So whether, whether that be al Paquita or, you know, one of the other, one of the other bits that you guys provide, what's, what's the strangest, the most surprising thing that somebody has done with it?

Alex Belokrylov  (00:54:43):
What surprised me the last several years is the using the platform as the u use using, using our product libera for embedded solutions with Java effects. I think that's, that's the most imp impressive part. Many people can see that JavaFX as the black dead end. However, as I see there are lots of projects which still use JavaFX for UI for graphical user interface. And I identified some projects which started recently, and they used that technology for, for, for, for, for their solution.

Jonathan Bennett (00:55:39):
All right. And then what, so you, you mentioned this idea of trying to keep Java relevant for the next 10 years. What do you see as your primary competitor? What are people moving to? I mean, I, I doubt p big to see PHP code as the next big thing, right? That's kind of on its way out too. Are, are people looking at moving to Python, maybe via flask or what, what is the big competitor to Java?

Alex Belokrylov  (00:56:08):
I see, I see several, according to title the index this year, Java moved to a fourth position from the third one. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And the first position is taken by Python, definitely. So Python considered is the most popular programing language in the world, but as I see the, the, the projects moves to go and projects moves to rust. It's n adoption is not really like wide. And this is not UBI ubiquitous languages. Java is still the, the leader there for enterprise software development. But who knows what will happen next.

Doc Searls (00:56:56):
So we are down into the, the short roses they say in, in agriculture here. So we always close with with a question, which is, is there anything we haven't asked that you wish we had asked that you could answer in a fairly short time

Alex Belokrylov  (00:57:12):
<Laugh>? Hmm.

Jonathan Bennett (00:57:15):
This is always a tough question because

Doc Searls (00:57:16):
You have to, you've done a really great job of covering a lot of territory. I'd have to tell you, you

Jonathan Bennett (00:57:22):
Have to do some set calculations. What all have I talked about? What all did I want to talk about? It's, it's a challenging one to do on the spot.

Alex Belokrylov  (00:57:29):
Yeah. This, this, this is interesting. Yeah. Maybe, maybe <laugh> the usual, usual question. Like there are number of open JDK distributions, how to select the perfect one. And here my answer would be it's depends on your requirements as always. Like the selection of anything should be based on the requirements, and you need to compare your requirements to the options provided by the project. And the same, I would recommend to the open G DK distributions. If you, you don't need anything out of the Java distribution, you can use any, anything. If you need some specific parts like legacy supports or like very small containers, people know what to consider.

Doc Searls (00:58:27):
So, okay. So last <laugh>, last two questions. Let's see if we see, see, oh, there's a remark in the I R C I'm supposed to look at here. Java is the new cobal. He said that's not, that's not kind <laugh>, that's, but yeah. 

Alex Belokrylov  (00:58:45):
Ja Java is a new COBAL for 15 years already.

Doc Searls (00:58:49):
<Laugh> well, I, I, so it's, I have friends who were coball programmers, they still employed. So <laugh>, this stuff doesn't go away. <Laugh>. That's, that's, that's unkind. But why not? When when you accurate, you've

Alex Belokrylov  (00:59:05):
Got a winner. I, I, I wouldn't say so. Yeah, Java. Java is evolving, it's evolving, it's not it's not embedded in some like hype features. Java is always waiting than any developer practices and developers features will be adopted by developer community within other projects. And then Java absorbed that technology which already had traction, which already had proven track records because Java creators knows that they are creating the technology for decades, not for a couple of years of hype.

Doc Searls (00:59:50):
So final, final two questions. Short ones that, would it be interested in your answer, what is your favorite scripting language? And and text editor, <laugh>, we ask everybody this

Alex Belokrylov  (01:00:03):
<Laugh> there, the text text editor is atom and the description languages, JavaScript,

Doc Searls (01:00:11):
<Laugh>, <laugh>. That would make a ki a kind of sense. Well, Alex, it has been great having you on here. You've been a fantastic guest and and we hope to have you back one of these days.

Alex Belokrylov  (01:00:25):
Thanks a lot, doc. Thanks a lot, Jonathan. It's my pleasure being here. And

Doc Searls (01:00:31):
<Laugh>,

Alex Belokrylov  (01:00:31):
Thanks a lot for the invitation. One more time

Doc Searls (01:00:34):
As well, as well here. Thanks. So Jonathan, how don't you had some great questions. Thank you for carrying the weight on that

Jonathan Bennett (01:00:44):
<Laugh>. It was fun. I <laugh>, I don't know, I I sort of I sort of secretly have thought for a while that Java is the new cobal. And, and then as some people pointed out, well, maybe that is accurate because Cobalt is not as dead as people think it is too. I, I don't know. There, there is definitely a lot of places where Java is still getting used. And so it is great that there are people that still care about it and are still carrying the torch. I also found, I found it really interesting that he, he made two statements, the first one being just kind of offhandedly. Yeah. We're also interested whether Al Paquita does well with Python. And then, yeah, we know Python is the most popular language in the world, and a lot of enterprises are moving to it.

(01:01:28):
It's like, I wonder if they're thinking about that <laugh>. But it's cool. It's, it's also very, very neat to see sort of the in-depth tuning that they're doing with particularly with a paquita and, and all of the different things inside that Linux distribution that they're touching to try to make it as performant as possible on a bunch of a bunch of different platforms. And so some of the things he was talking about is, is like, you have your, so what they would do is they would run a test case and they would see, okay, which function is this test case spending the most time in? And then let's go tune that function for a, a processor that has AVX five 12. And then if you go and run it on like a, a Zion processor that has AVX five 12 support, it'll use those particular commands tho those that, that processor extension. And I find that that really interesting because some things in Lennox do that and other things don't. And it's just fascinating where you can squeeze every bit of performance out of whatever machine you're running on. So I think that's pretty cool too.

Doc Searls (01:02:37):
Yeah, it, it's interesting to me because the you know, I was kind of around for the beginning of Java and the ambitions behind Java that Sun had at the time. And, and you know, if you could have stood in the halls then and said, what, where will we be, you know, 30 years from now? And you know, where there, there are the few proprietary li unixes are all but gone. It was interesting to hear that I X is still out there or that I B M Unix or HP Unix is still out there in some places mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. but you know, that these things are very, very kind of permanent. I mean, it's interesting, this, this week it's almost irrelevant, but we had this big power outage and all the radio stations went off and the one people missed the most, I think was the classical station. So that's the co classical music is the coball of <laugh> of music, I suppose. <Laugh>. And people still like it anyway, so so what have you got the plug and so we can get out in

Jonathan Bennett (01:03:37):
Time? Sure. So I've got, I've got two things that I pretty much always plug, and the first is over@hackaday.com. You can catch my work there, particularly every Friday morning we have the security column goes live, and sometimes we talk about Java related security things. Most of the ca most of the time over on Java land, it's de serialization bugs which seems to be kind of the the Achilles heel for Java. They always keep having to fix. And then the other thing of course, to plug is the Untitled Lenox Show, which is a club twit exclusive show. And I, I mentioned this last week and then got privately told that I mentioned it too early. Well, I can officially mention it this week, <laugh> we have a video feed now for the Untitled Lenox show starting with episode 84. So you have to go and subscribe to that. It is yet another feed inside your Club twit membership page. But you can catch our beautiful and wonderful faces. We'll go with that and, and get to see some video and we have hopes of maybe doing some more things with that live demos and actually being able to show you the things that we're working on. So that will be fun. Catch those two things. Keep up with me there.

Doc Searls (01:04:48):
Yeah, so, so for people listening and not watching Jonathan has a bad face for radio. So <laugh>, thank you. One of those. I have a good face for radio. Anyway, I wanna let everybody know that next week's guest is is Christine Hall. Christine Hall is a real authority on All Matters floss journalist and hacker from way back and a lot of fun to talk to that is coming up next week. And we will see you then. I'm Doc, Doc Searls, and see you next week.

Leo Laporte (01:05:20):
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