Oracle has introduced Graal Cloud Native 4.2.1, a curated, Oracle-supported build of the open source Micronaut framework, which provides a full-stack JVM platform for developing modular microservices and serverless applications.
Graal Cloud Native 4.2.1 was unveiled January 30. Offering out-of-the-box support for native compilation, Graal Cloud Native modules have integrated APIs and libraries for Google Cloud Platform services including Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL for MySQL, Secret Manager, Cloud Trace, Cloud Monitoring, and Google Kubernetes Engine.
Graal Cloud Native offers a curated set of Micronaut modules that simplify cloud application development and are designed to be compiled ahead-of-time with GraalVM Native Image, backed by support from Oracle. Developers can build portable cloud-native Java microservices that start quickly and use fewer resources to reduce compute costs, Oracle said.
Graal Cloud Native 4.2.1 is designed to work with Java 21 and Java 17. Developers can use Java 21 features such as virtual threads in Graal Cloud Native applications. Graal Cloud Native modules have been integrated and tested with the latest releases of Oracle GraalVM for JDK 17 and JDK 21, which are available under the GraalVM Free Terms and Conditions license.
Graal Cloud Native applications compiled ahead of time with GraalVM Native Image require less memory and CPU to run at scale, start much faster, operate at peak performance immediately, and have a much smaller attack surface compared with traditional JVM-based counterparts, Oracle said.
The companion 4.2.1 release of Graal Cloud Native Tools for Visual Studio Code includes support for Micronaut Expression language and the Micronaut Control Panel, and offers improved support for working with the Oracle Autonomous Database in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.