The days of debating whether to run stateful monolithic Java applications on bare metal or virtual machines are largely behind us. In 2025, Kubernetes (K8s) is the de facto operating system for the cloud, and Java—specifically with the advancements in JDK 21+ and Spring Boot 3—remains the dominant language for enterprise backends.
In the cloud-native era of 2025, containerizing a Java application is no longer just about writing a Dockerfile that “works.” With rising cloud infrastructure costs and the increasing adoption of Kubernetes and Serverless platforms (like AWS Fargate or Google Cloud Run), the efficiency of your container images has a direct impact on your bottom line and system reliability.
In the modern landscape of software engineering, “it works on my machine” is no longer the benchmark—it is barely the starting line. As we move through 2025, the cost of cloud computing continues to rise, and user tolerance for latency continues to drop. For Java developers, this creates a specific pressure: how do we squeeze every ounce of performance out of our microservices while maintaining maintainability?
For over a decade, Spring Boot has been the undisputed king of the Java ecosystem. However, as we move through 2025, the landscape of application development has shifted dramatically towards serverless architectures, Kubernetes-native deployments, and “scale-to-zero” requirements.
