Supporting Java 8 for your Corda and Corda Enterprise nodes

Supporting Java 8 for your Corda and Corda Enterprise nodes

Corda is a very Java centric platform. As described in the original Corda Technical Whitepaper choosing to embed the Java Virtual Machine specification in the Corda specification was one of the first crucial design decisions which helped grow an active Corda developer community. This approach enables developers to write code in a variety of languages, use well developed toolchains, and to reuse code already authored in Java or other JVM compatible languages. The Java standards also specify a comprehensive system for expressing common business data such as time and calendar handling. As a result all versions of Corda and Corda Enterprise to date have been built and tested with Java in mind.

In September this year Oracle released its first long term support Java offering, Java 11. With Oracle promising to provide updates to Java 11 for at least eight years we can now invest time and effort in upgrading Corda and Corda Enterprise to use Oracle Java 11 safe in the knowledge this is time well spent. This upgrade is going to take us a number of months, and from January 2019 Oracle will no longer provide commercial user support for Oracle JDK 8. So what are your options to ensure your production deployments of Corda and Corda Enterprise remain supported in the meantime?

Supporting Java 8 for your Corda and Corda Enterprise nodes

If you already have a support agreement with Oracle then your Corda installation using Oracle JDK 8 it is possible you are covered already, but do check with your Oracle account manager. Of course you can choose to pay for continued support of Oracle JDK 8 if you do not have an agreement in place already.

Alternatively you can move to variants of OpenJDK, an open source implementation of Oracle JDK, where support can be more cost effective, or in some cases, free. Corda and Corda Enterprise 4 will be tested and validated with these popular variants of OpenJDK:

• Azul Zulu OpenJDK 8. Compatible with Windows, Linux and MacOS. If you host your Corda nodes on Azure you will benefit from free support from Azul otherwise you will need to purchase a support agreement with Azul to receive security upgrades and patches. It is likely that Azul’s support will be cheaper than Oracle’s.
• Amazon Corretto 8. Currently compatible with Amazon Linux 2, Windows and MacOS with support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ubuntu due to arrive in Q1 2019. Security updates beyond January 2019 are free.
• Red Hat OpenJDK 8. Currently compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Security updates beyond January 2019 are free if running on a licensed copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We are committed to making your production deployment of Corda and Corda Enterprise a safe long term decision. Do contact your R3 account manager for further information on keeping your Corda nodes supported.