[javaone 2026] how netflix uses java 2026 edition

Speaker: Paul Bakker

See the live blog table of contents


General

  • Gave this talk last year, but it changes over time
  • Architecture is same as last year. I blogged about this last year
  • Java still best radeoff between runtime performance, developer productivity and maintainability

What’s not Java

  • JavaScript, Android, Swift for mobile.
  • Go for Platform side cars
  • Python for “data science”

Spring Boot

  • Spring Boot Netflix customization
  • Open sourced
  • Includes annotation, post processors, etc
  • Use SpringBootTest
  • Fully on Spring Boot 3 now. Included JavaEE to Jakarta EE and Gradle upgrade
  • Starting migration to Spring Boot 4. Driving the migration using Claude Code
  • Open sourced their Gradle plugin

Upgrade philosophy

  • Better to upgrade sooner, but that means need to do it more often
  • Want to make it as painless as possible; tooling helps

DGS – GraphQL

  • DGS framework – open sourced – https://netflix.github.io/dgs for making it easy to use GraphQL
  • scheme to query data
  • gRPC – performance. think “methods” not “data”
  • Use graphql or gRPC over REST

Garbage Collection – ZGC

  • Now default to ZGC
  • Thought ZGC would be better for some use cases put turned out to be for all workloads
  • Spend more CPU to lower pause times
  • Mostly Java 21 and 25

VIrtual Threads

  • Rolledback because wasn’t safe for all of their use cases.
  • Java 25 fixed those problems so recently started looking at again.

My take

I’ve seen prior version of this talk. I was super curious to see how AI changed it. Unfortunately, that topic was last and I had to leave early to setup for my presentation (in a different building). It was nice hearing the plans to use Claude Code for the Spring Boot 4 upgrade. THere were other changes I did get to hear about so worth going!

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