Enhancing DevOps Efficiency: Azul Intelligence Cloud Utilizes Production Runtime Data to Optimize Java Estates

Singapore, (May 6, 2024) — Java-focussed company, Azul, announced today that it now supports Oracle JDK and any OpenJDK-based JVM (Java Virtual Machine) from any vendor or distribution. Azul Intelligence Cloud is Azul’s cloud analytics solution that delivers actionable intelligence from production Java runtime data to dramatically boost developer productivity.

Companies are under pressure to guarantee the security of their apps and client data while also accelerating application innovation cycles and optimizing their development resources. Two services in Azul’s Intelligence Cloud solve these issues for Java applications that are in use in production:

• Azul Vulnerability Detection, to eliminate false positives by accurately identifying and prioritising known security vulnerabilities; and
• Code Inventory, to help identify unused and dead code by precisely detailing what custom and third-party code is actually run.

“We clearly see the benefit that Azul Intelligence Cloud delivers to our customers by helping their DevOps teams save an immense amount of time and increasing their productivity,” said Ed Tybursky, managing partner at Remend, an independent Oracle advisory firm. “The ability to efficiently triage vulnerable code and identify unused code for removal from telemetry across an entire Java estate, regardless of JDK distribution or vendor, is a crucial capability that enables DevOps teams to effectively focus their time and attention.”

“Enterprise IT teams need accurate, unified insights they can put into action to improve efficiency and control costs,” said Jevin Jensen, IDC research vice president, Intelligent CloudOps. “A solution that can reduce false positives found in most vulnerability scanning enables DevOps, SRE and CloudOps teams to focus on the actual Common Vulnerability and Exposures (CVEs) that are executed by production applications. By avoiding code paths that are never executed, teams can move faster and reduce remediation costs.”

Many organizations are seeking to modernise their applications for a cloud-native AI-powered world, but legacy codebases can hold back this innovation and prevent DevOps teams from reaching their full potential. Often, teams have added features but not retired old code, making maintenance more difficult and increasing the risk of unexpected behavior or exposure to vulnerabilities.

“We acquired another firm recently and aren’t familiar with their codebase. It contains millions of lines of code – reading and understanding that code would take months. With Code Inventory, we identified large portions of unused code, archived it and now spend our time working on the important parts. This has significantly sped up our development cycles,” said an Azul Intelligence Cloud user from a leading fintech trading firm.

For DevOps teams, dealing with Java application deployments that often comprise a heterogeneous mix of JVMs across different Java vendors, platforms and versions becomes increasingly complex. By supporting any JDK distribution including those from Azul, Oracle, Amazon, Eclipse, Microsoft, Red Hat and others, Azul Intelligence Cloud delivers key benefits across an enterprise’s entire Java fleet.

“Ever since the Log4J event, we have seen a dramatic rise in ‘false positives’ as a result of the various tools that organisations have employed to address Java application vulnerabilities,” said James Yang, vice president of sales at Cloud Creek, an Azul channel partner. “Currently, we are on the phone with customers 3 to 4 times a week to prove that these are false positives; often, we have up to 15 people on the phone from both the client side and our team spending anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to address this. How is this productive? It’s almost like crying wolf. Azul’s Intelligence Cloud solution takes all this pain away, completely removing the false positives and allowing our customers to quickly and effectively remediate the vulnerabilities that matter.”

“Today’s businesses are under relentless pressure to innovate, accelerate time-to-market and fortify application security, all while grappling with resource constraints,” said Scott Sellers, co-founder and CEO of Azul. “Azul Intelligence Cloud is a game-changer. Using the information already inside JVMs running in production, Intelligence Cloud provides unprecedented precision and the intelligence needed to solve two significant DevOps challenges – alert fatigue from an intractable vulnerability, a false positive backlog and technical debt from maintaining unused code. We’re excited to extend these capabilities across all an enterprise’s Java application fleet, regardless of JDK vendor or distribution, to dramatically slash time from unproductive tasks and multiply DevOps productivity.”