Why Java Is Dying

What does the future hold for Java?

Komal Venkatesh Ganesan
5 min readDec 17, 2020
Coffee with foam design
Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash.

To better align with the tech stack at my new job, I’ve been reacquainting myself over the last two weeks with an old friend: Java. Not too long ago, it kickstarted my software career with unmatched zeal and vigor. This journey lasted for roughly two-and-a-half years but soon diminished with the advent of containers and microservices. Fast-forward to today, and it’s been three years now since I last wrote any serious Java code. And in all honesty, I never expected it to see it again — especially in the microservices landscape.

So, what happened? The answer is simple: The pervasive wave of microservices engulfed us.

  • Ease of scaling
  • High availability
  • Simpler code base from not having to worry about concurrency and multi-threading
  • Portability benefits from containerization

All of these factors prompted us to question the efficacy of Java (more specifically, JVM), not to mention its most notorious framework, Spring.

At times, with hands immersed in tech like Kubernetes, it felt like Java’s time was almost over and that it didn’t hold up well in the ecosystem of containers and microservices (which was key to software scalability and high availability). But as a once-staunch…

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Komal Venkatesh Ganesan

Engineer — Software / AI / Electronics / Technology. In pursuit of fundamental understanding of elemental physics/science | LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/2DN8rfP