Holly Cummins on How Quarkus Can Help You Go from Code to Cloud in No Time

Many enterprises are looking for a way to take advantage of cloud-native architectures, but many do not know the best approach. Enter Quarkus, an open-source Kubernetes-native Java framework acclaimed for its lightning quick boot time, advanced features such as native binaries and state-of-the-art productivity. But beyond all these capabilities, Quarkus can help you reduce your projects’ carbon footprints. We sat down with Holly Cummins from Red Hat who will cover all of the amazing features of Quarkus and why it should be part of your tech stack. 

How Quarkus is taking the tech world by storm

It's no secret that many organizations are striving to make the move from monolithic applications to applications based on microservices, as well as reorganize their development paradigm to reap the benefits of microservice development in a DevOps economy. With Quarkus, developers can more quickly build, test, and deploy their applications, improving application time to market.

Quarkus’ framework is designed to streamline the development process, enabling developers to build and deploy cloud-native applications quickly and efficiently. By using Quarkus, developers can benefit from a variety of features, including lightning-fast startup times, reduced memory usage, and automatic containerization. Plus, because Quarkus is designed to work seamlessly with popular tools and languages like Kubernetes and Java, it makes it easy to integrate with existing development workflows.

Scale quickly with Quarkus

The benefits of really come when you're looking at a containerized environment or a cloud native environment. By using Quarkus, you can get rid of a whole bunch of boilerplate code that you've been living with since the beginning of Java. Furthermore, Quarkus enables easy integration with other frameworks so developers can work with technologies they are familiar with. It provides extreme flexibility by allowing users to selectively add or remove extensions, which results in applications that are optimized for the specific features required. Overall, Quarkus offers a range of practical advantages to developers, whether they're building microservices or complex enterprise applications.

The atoms that comprise Quarkus

The secret sauce behind Quarkus' efficiency lies in its ability to leverage innovative technologies such as GraalVM and Kubernetes, which optimize the memory footprint, reduce start-up time and enhance fault tolerance. By making use of Quarkus, developers can create and deploy containerized apps in a matter of minutes, all while benefiting from more straightforward debugging and enhanced performance.

In addition, continuous testing in Quarkus is implemented on the command line and using the DEV tool, doing it right during development, eliminates a lot of third-party tools and side processes for it.

Quarkus vs Spring Boot

Quarkus and Spring Boot are trying to solve similar problems, which aims to answer the question 'How do I make a modern runtime?' Quarkus is perhaps the next step in evolution compared to Spring Boot just because of the chronology of when it was created. One cannot replace the other, at least not in the short term. They are different approaches to solving issues. Overall as an industry, it is really positive because we're going in this direction of getting the smaller and nicer runtimes. 

How companies are using Quarkus

Quarkus has been gaining traction in the world of software development due to its impressive speed, small footprint, and container-first approach.  It's easy to see why projects such as Red Hat EAP and Nokia Mobile Network Manager have been successful using Quarkus in production. With its tooling around microservices, integration with other frameworks and its ability to handle large-scale data operations without compromising on performance, it’s no wonder Quarkus is quickly becoming the go-to choice for many development teams. Whether you’re a novice or a seasoned developer, you can rest assured knowing that Quarkus can help improve your workflow in more ways than one.


One prime example is the cloud-native financial platform, Finastra. They were able to reduce their deployment time by 50% by migrating to Quarkus. Another successful implementation was by UK-based company Credit Kudos, who used Quarkus to build a real-time credit decision system that is capable of handling millions of transactions per second. These success stories and many others continue to prove that Quarkus is a reliable and efficient choice for building modern applications and streamlining an application's scaling capabilities.

Still curious? Meet Holly in person

Meet Holly at GOTO Amsterdam in June and see a live demo on how it works. Find out whether Quarkus really starts faster than a light bulb and what an integration testing flow with it can look like.

Holly will also be discussing about sustainability in software at GOTO Aarhus. Learn about some of the trade-offs for a modern software developer when it comes to writing code and climate impact. Holly will provide a roadmap to figuring out the right thing and whether Java is even a good choice going forward.