Afraid of Java cold starts in Serverless? Fear not, Java is super fast!
summary
Plain Java starts in the tens of milliseconds — a simple program boots in around 50 ms — while full app servers like GlassFish take about 4.3 seconds and embedded GlassFish ~2.5s. Lightweight Jakarta EE engines such as Piranha Cloud hit roughly 150 ms for servlet cold starts. Quarkus uses build-time AOT and GraalVM native images to shrink start and size, JVM tweaks (CDS, tiered compilation) cut startup 10–25%, and custom runtimes change billing and tradeoffs.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Java in Serverless
- 3:16AWS Lambda cold starts
- 9:46Java vs other languages
- 11:12Startup times with Jakarta EE
- 17:10Optimizing with Quarkus
- 20:26Piranha Cloud alternative
- 28:27Piranha benchmarking
- 30:27JVM optimizations
- 34:42Native compilation
- 35:04Key takeaways
- 35:46Q&A
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