Graalvm

This is a cross-post. I wrote this up for the dev.to audience. For the full architecture, benchmarks, and SDK compatibility numbers, read the in-depth write-up here on the site: Introducing Floci. Floci’s ~24 ms startup is not one clever trick. It is four battle-tested open-source projects stacked on top of each other, each doing the job it does best: Netty for high-performance async I/O. Vert.x for the reactive, event-driven toolkit. Quarkus for the application framework and build-time optimization. GraalVM Mandrel to compile the whole thing to a native binary. Together they take startup from the 2 to 6 seconds a typical JVM app needs down to ~24 ms, and idle memory from a few hundred MiB down to ~13 MiB. The honest takeaway is that this speed is borrowed: years of production hardening in those libraries are what let Floci spend its own effort on the part that matters, AWS protocol fidelity across 45 services and 1,925 SDK compatibility tests (Java, Python, Node.js, Go, and Rust). ...

This is a cross-post. I wrote this up for the dev.to audience. For the full architecture, benchmarks, and SDK compatibility numbers, read the in-depth write-up here on the site: Introducing Floci. “Java” is not the answer people expect for a tool that has to feel instant. But the choice was made on constraints, not taste. Floci needs to cold start in milliseconds, idle in single-digit MiB, and ship as one small binary that drops cleanly into a CI pipeline. Java 25, compiled with Quarkus and GraalVM, hits all three: a ~24 ms cold start, ~13 MiB idle memory, and a single ~90 MB binary. Modern features like virtual threads let it juggle many AWS services concurrently without ceremony. ...

Floci is a suite of local cloud emulators that let you run AWS, Azure, and GCP services on your own machine, with no accounts, auth tokens, or usage limits. Every emulator is built with Quarkus, compiled to a native binary with GraalVM Mandrel, starts in ~24 ms, and idles around 13 MiB. Everything is MIT-licensed and free forever. The name comes from cirrocumulus floccus, a small, fluffy cloud formation. That’s the design goal: minimal, lightweight, and always free. ...

Talk given at JConf Dominicana, July 2019 What Is Quarkus? Quarkus is a Kubernetes-native Java stack designed for GraalVM and OpenJDK HotSpot, crafted from the best Java libraries and standards. Created by Red Hat License Apache License v2.0 Version at time of talk 1.0.0.CR2 The tagline says it all: Supersonic Subatomic Java, startup times measured in milliseconds, memory footprints measured in megabytes. GraalVM: The Engine Behind Native Compilation GraalVM is a universal virtual machine capable of running JavaScript, Python, Ruby, R, Java, all JVM-based languages, and LLVM-based languages like C and C++. ...