Microsoft has announced the preview of its own build of OpenJDK, a free and open-source implementation of the Java SE platform.
The Microsoft Build of OpenJDK is a long-term support (LTS) distribution that includes binaries for Java 11, based on OpenJDK 11.0.10+9, on x64 server and desktop environments on macOS, Linux, and Windows.
In a blog post, Microsoft wrote:
“Microsoft deploys over 500,000 Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) internally – excluding all Azure services and customer workloads – with needs that go from back-end microservices to Big Data systems, message brokers, event streaming services, and gaming servers.
More than 140,000 of these JVMs are already based on the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK.”
Azul, a veteran Microsoft partner and key provider of Java technologies powering Azure, also distributes OpenJDK builds which it calls Zulu. Azul has welcomed Microsoft joining the “rich community” of OpenJDK build distributors which also includes Red Hat, Amazon, SAP, Alibaba, BellSoft, and Eclipse Adoptium.
Scott Sellers, President and CEO of Azul, said:
“We believe that a thriving OpenJDK community is key to Java’s continued success, and welcome Microsoft to the impressive list of those offering builds of OpenJDK.
This is great news for OpenJDK and Java in general, and further fuels the momentum as enterprises and developers move off proprietary Java offerings to OpenJDK distributions. We look forward to our ongoing collaboration with Microsoft in support of Azure’s Java users and of the Java user community as a whole.”
Microsoft’s OpenJDK build adopts the same build scripts used by the Eclipse Adoptium project and tested against the Eclipse Adoptium Quality Assurance suite. The build’s Java 11 binaries have also passed the Java Technical Compatibility Kit (TCK).
Microsoft says it will support Java 11 until at least 2024 and will continue to collaborate through the OpenJDK Project and the Eclipse Adoptium Working Group.
Later this year, the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK will become the default distribution for Java 11 across Azure-managed services.
You can download Microsoft’s OpenJDK packages and installers here.
(Photo by Yanapi Senaud on Unsplash)
