Graal Cloud Native 4.2.1 Announcement

We are excited to announce the general availability of Graal Cloud Native 4.2.1 based on Micronaut® framework 4.2.1.

Graal Cloud Native (GCN) is an Oracle build of the open source Micronaut framework. GCN provides a curated set of Micronaut framework modules that simplify cloud application development, are designed to be compiled ahead-of-time with GraalVM Native Image, and are fully supported by Oracle. GCN enables you to easily build portable cloud native Java microservices that start instantly and use fewer resources to reduce compute costs.

Let us look at some of the notable changes in this release.

Cloud Integration

GCN modules provide platform-independent API’s and libraries for a set of core public cloud services, including Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Amazon Web Services. Read more about it here. With this release, GCN 4.2.1 modules have also been designed, integrated and tested with Google Cloud Platform services such as Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL for MySQL, Secrets Manager, Identity with OpenID Connect, Cloud Logging, Cloud Monitoring, Cloud Trace, Google Kubernetes Engine, and more. Now you can easily build, deploy and operate Java applications on Google Cloud Platform. Moreover, you can write Java applications once and run them on any supported public cloud – Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud Platform – and thus avoid cloud vendor lock-in.

New Guides for Google Cloud

This GCN release contains new guides to help you learn how to create Java applications that use Google Cloud Platform services:

See GCN Guides for a complete list of guides for all supported public clouds.

Support for Java 21 and GraalVM Native Image

GCN 4.2.1 is designed and tested to work with both Java 21 and Java 17. Now you can use Java 21 features like Virtual Threads in your GCN applications.

GCN modules offer out-of-the-box support for native compilation. GCN 4.2.1 modules have been integrated and tested with the latest releases of Oracle GraalVM for JDK 21 and JDK 17, available under the GraalVM Free Terms and Conditions (GFTC) license. GCN applications compiled ahead-of-time with GraalVM Native Image require far less memory and CPU to run at scale, start up to 100x faster, operate at peak performance immediately, and have a much smaller attack surface compared to their traditional JVM-based counterparts.

New Bill of Materials with Micronaut Framework 4.2.1

In this release, we have updated the Micronaut framework version from 4.0.7 to 4.2.1 applying patches to multiple Micronaut modules. See Micronaut Framework Releases for more information. We have a new bill of materials for GCN 4.2.1 consisting of specific versions of Micronaut framework 4.2.1 modules and their dependencies that are compatible and tested together. This reduces the risk of library incompatibility and version mismatches, and saves you from having to test and figure this out yourself.

Include the BOM in your build files using:

Gradle:

dependencies {
    micronautBoms(platform("cloud.graal.gcn:gcn-bom:4.2.1.3"))
    ...
}

Maven:

<dependency>
  <groupId>cloud.graal.gcn</groupId>
  <artifactId>gcn-bom</artifactId>
  <version>4.2.1.3</version>
  <type>pom</type>
  <scope>import</scope>
</dependency>

Updated Launcher and CLI

The GCN Launcher and the GCN CLI have been updated to include the above changes. You can use the GCN Launcher to generate application starter templates for your preferred public cloud from a web browser. If you prefer command-line tools instead, use the GCN CLI.

GCN 4.2.1 Launcher with Micronaut 4.2.1, Java 21, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Updated VS Code Tooling

The 4.2.1 release of the Graal Cloud Native Tools includes support for the Micronaut Expression Language, the Micronaut Control Panel, and improved support for working with Oracle Autonomous Database in the cloud. Take a look at the GCN Tools release blog post to find out more.

Join us on Slack

We would love to hear your feedback on Graal Cloud Native and the features in this release. We now have a channel in the Oracle Developers workspace. Join the workspace and then join the #graal-cloud-native channel to get in touch.

Next Steps

 

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