Amazon Corretto, Java 17 adoption soar, New Relic reports

Adoption of Java 17, the most recent Long Term Support (LTS) version of Java, has skyrocketed, growing 430% in the past year, according to New Relic’s latest report on Java usage. The report also found that Amazon Corretto is now the most-used Java Development Kit (JDK), with a 31% share of Java instances.

More than 9% of Java production applications use Java 17 today, versus fewer than 1% in 2022, the 2023 State of the Java Ecosystem Report says. Java 17, aka JDK 17, was published in September 2021. As an LTS release, Java 17 receives several years of Premier-level and extended support from Oracle.

New Relic found that more than 56% of the production Java applications it monitored use Java 11, an LTS release published in September 2018. Java 8, an LTS release from 2014, was the second most-used version in production, with nearly 33% of monitored applications, down from 46% in 2022. Less than 1% of production applications are still using Java 7, which arrived in July 2011.

New Relic compiled its report based on data gathered in January 2023 from millions of applications that provide performance data to the company’s observability platform. New Relic noted that the data was anonymized to provide a general overview of Java usage, and does not provide a global picture of Java usage.

Other findings of the 2023 New Relic report:

• Amazon is now the most popular JDK vendor, at 31%. In 2020, Oracle was the most popular JDK vendor by far, with roughly 75% of the market. But Oracle slipped to 34% in 2022 and to 28% in 2023. New Relic cites as a reason Oracle’s more restrictive licensing of Java 11; the company has since returned to a more open stance with Java 17.
• The most popular non-LTS version of Java is Java 14, released in January 2020. But uptake for non-LTS versions, which are supported for only six months, was low, with only 1.6% of applications using them. Non-LTS versions arrive every six months, interrupted only by LTS versions now arriving every two years. Java 17 is the current LTS release. The next LTS release, Java 21, is due in September.
• 70% of Java applications reporting to New Relic do so from a container.
• The G1 garbage collector continues to be the clear favorite among users of Java 11 or later, with 65% of New Relic customers using G1.