Azul Systems, Inc. develops runtimes ( JDKs, JVMs) for executing

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

-based applications. Founded in March 2002, Azul Systems is headquartered in

Sunnyvale, California Sunnyvale () is a city located in the Santa Clara Valley in northwest Santa Clara County in the U.S. state of California. Sunnyvale lies along the historic El Camino Real and Highway 101 and is bordered by portions of San Jose to the nor ...

Products

Azul Platform Prime (Formerly Zing)

Azul produces ''Platform Prime'', a

Java virtual machine A Java virtual machine (JVM) is a virtual machine that enables a computer to run Java programs as well as programs written in other languages that are also compiled to Java bytecode. The JVM is detailed by a specification that formally describe ...

(JVM) and runtime platform for Java applications. Platform Prime is compliant with the associated Java SE version standards. It is based on the same HotSpot JVM and JDK code base used by the Oracle and OpenJDK JDKs, with enhancements relating to

Garbage Collection Waste collection is a part of the process of waste management. It is the transfer of solid waste from the point of use and disposal to the point of treatment or landfill. Waste collection also includes the curbside collection of recyclabl ...

, JIT Compilation, and Warmup behaviors, all aimed at producing improved application execution metrics and performance indicators. Key feature areas delivered by Platform Prime include: * C4 (Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector): A Garbage collector reported to maintain concurrent, disruption-free application execution across wide ranges of heap sizes and allocation rates rom sub-GB to multi-TB, from MBs/sec to tens of GB/sec* Falcon: An

LLVM LLVM is a set of compiler and toolchain technologies that can be used to develop a front end for any programming language and a back end for any instruction set architecture. LLVM is designed around a language-independent intermediate repre ...

-based JIT compiler that delivers dynamically and heavily optimized application code at runtime * ReadyNow: A feature aimed at improving application startup and warmup behaviors, reducing the amount of slowness experienced by Java applications as they get started or restarted Formerly known as Zing, it first became available on October 19, 2010.''https://www.zdnet.com/article/azul-zing-moving-its-jvm-from-silicon-to-software/'' "Azul Zing: moving its JVM from silicon to software" ZDNet article The company was formerly known for its ''Vega Java Compute Appliances'', specialized hardware designed to use compute resources available to Java applications. Zing utilized and improved on the software technology initially developed for the Vega hardware. The product has been regularly updated and refreshed since. Platform Prime is available for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

, and requires x86-based hardware powered by Intel or AMD processors.

Azul Platform Core (Formerly Zulu and Zulu Embedded JVM)

Azul distributes and supports Zulu and Zulu Enterprise, a certified binary build of

OpenJDK OpenJDK (Open Java Development Kit) is a free and open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE). It is the result of an effort Sun Microsystems began in 2006. The implementation is licensed under the GPL-2.0-only w ...

. The initial release in September 2013 supported Java 7 and 6 and ran on Windows 2008 R2 and 2012 on the Windows Azure Cloud. On January 21, 2014, Azul announced Zulu support for multiple

versions as well as Zulu Enterprise, which has subscription support options. Support for Java 8 was added in April 2014 and Mac OS X support was added in June 2014. In September 2014, Zulu was extended to support Docker. Zulu Embedded, which allows developers to customize the build footprint, was released in March, 2015. Developed for manufacturers in the embedded, mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) markets, each Zulu Embedded build is verified by Azul using the Java Community

Technology Compatibility Kit A Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK) is a suite of tests that at least nominally checks a particular alleged implementation of a Java Specification Request (JSR) for compliance. It is one of the three required pieces for a ratified JSR in the Java ...

(TCK) and incorporates the latest OpenJDK bug fixes and security patches. Azul produces the jHiccup open source performance measurement tool for Java applications. It is designed to measure the stalls or "hiccups" caused by an application's underlying Java platform.

Azul Intelligence Cloud

In December 2021, Azul launched Intelligence Cloud, a family of products that apply cloud resources to analyze and optimize Java fleets and provide actionable intelligence. The first offering, Cloud Native Compiler, uses a cloud-centric approach that decouples Just in Time (JIT) compilation from the

Java Virtual Machine A Java virtual machine (JVM) is a virtual machine that enables a computer to run Java programs as well as programs written in other languages that are also compiled to Java bytecode. The JVM is detailed by a specification that formally describe ...

(JVM); it is compatible with all Java applications and retains the full advantages of JIT compilation.

Company History

Azul Systems was founded by Scott Sellers (now President & CEO), Gil Tene (CTO), and Shyam Pillalamarri. Initially founded as a hardware appliance company, Azul's Java Compute Appliances (JCAs) were designed to massively scale up the usable computing resources available to Java applications. The first compute appliances, offered in April 2005, were the Vega 1 based models. With the introduction of Azul Platform Prime in 2010, the company transitioned to producing software-only solutions. It retired its hardware appliance Vega product lines in 2013. Stephen DeWitt previously held the position of CEO.

Funding history

On April 1, 2020, Azul announced that it had closed a strategic growth equity investment led by London-based

Vitruvian Partners Vitruvian Partners is a European private equity firm focusing on leveraged buyout and growth capital investments in middle-market companies. Vitruvian invests throughout the UK and Europe and recently in China and India. The firm has offices ...

and New York-based Lead Edge Capital. In the agreement, Azul shareholders were expected to receive a total of approximately $340 million in consideration. Based on public filings,California Department of Business Oversight Database
/ref> Azul had raised more than $200M in financing to date.

References

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External links

Azul Systems
- Official website *
Priming Java for Speed
' – Azul CTO Gil Tene's presentation from QCon SF 2014 (video)
Understanding Java Garbage Collection
- Azul CTO Gil Tene's presentation from SpringOne 2GX 2013 (video)
C4 white paper
- White paper from the ACM conference describing the C4 (Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector) garbage collection algorithm. Authors: Gil Tene, Balaji Iyengar and Michael Wolf, all of Azul Systems
Enabling Java in Latency-Sensitive Environments
- Video of Azul CTO Gil Tene's presentation from QCon New York 2013 2002 establishments in California Companies based in Sunnyvale, California Software companies of the United States Software companies established in 2002