Azul Systems, Inc. (also known as Azul) is a company that develops and distributes runtime system (JDK, JRE, JVM) for executing Java-based applications. The company was founded in March 2002. Azul Systems has headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.
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.
[ Azul Systems at Purdue University Purdue University's S3Lab use of Vega 3 hardware platform for transactional memory abstraction research][ Azul Systems Vega 3 announcement, 2008]
With the introduction of Azul Platform Prime in 2010,
On April 1, 2020, Azul announced that it had closed a strategic growth equity investment led by London-based Vitruvian Partners and New York-based Lead Edge Capital.[
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target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> California Department of Business Oversight Database Azul had raised more than $200M in financing to date.
Products
Azul Platform Prime (formerly Zing)
Azul produced
Platform Prime, a Java virtual machine (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, JIT compilation, and Warmup behaviors, all aimed at producing improved application execution metrics and performance indicators.
Key feature areas in Platform Prime include:
Formerly known as Zing, it first became available on October 19, 2010.[ Azul Zing: moving its JVM from silicon to software, ZDNet] 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 then.[ Release Notes of Azul Zulu Prime Stream and Stable Builds of OpenJDK]
Platform Prime is available for Linux, and requires x86-based hardware powered by Intel or AMD processors.[ Azul Zulu Prime Builds of OpenJDK System Requirements]
Azul Platform Core (formerly Zulu and Zulu Embedded JVM)
Azul distributes and supports Zulu and Zulu Enterprise, a certified binary build of
OpenJDK. The initial release in September 2013 supported Java 7 ran on Windows 2008 R2 and 2012 on the Windows Azure Cloud.
[ Microsoft, Azul to put open-source Java on Azure cloud, InfoWorld, July 24, 2013 ] On January 21, 2014, Azul announced Zulu support for multiple
Linux versions, Java 6, as well as Zulu Enterprise, which has subscription support options.
[Azul Systems press releases Azul Systems® Launches Zulu™ Enterprise, a Commercialized, Fully-Supported Version of OpenJDK™ and Azul Systems® Extends Zulu™ to Support Java 6 and Major Linux Distributions] Support for Java 8 was added in April 2014 and Mac OS X support was added in June 2014.
[Azul Systems press releases Azul Systems Extends Zulu® Runtime for Java to Support Java 8 and Azul Systems Extends Zulu® Runtime for Java to Support Mac OS X] In September 2014, Zulu was extended to support Docker.
[ Run anywhere again: Java hooks up with Docker, InfoWorld] Zulu Embedded, which allows developers to customize the build footprint, was released in March, 2015.
[ Java-based platforms certified for IoT, Electronics Weekly]
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 Releases Open-Source jHiccup Tool to Provide Response Time Analysis of the Java Runtime]
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 product, Cloud Native Compiler,
uses a cloud-centric approach that decouples just-in-time (JIT) compilation from the Java virtual machine (JVM); it is compatible with all Java applications and retains the full advantages of JIT compilation.
External links
