Enterprise Application Service for Java overview

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IBM® Enterprise Application Service for Java® (EASeJ) helps you quickly build and promote your Java application to IBM Cloud®. You provide the application code and EASeJ provides an efficient application build, deployment, and monitoring experience that follows best practices, security and compliance, with a serverless experience.

You specify the location of a repository that holds your Java application. EASeJ builds the application with a secure SLSA-compliant build pipeline and then runs the application in the EASeJ runtime environment. The product automatically builds and tests your application and then you can choose to promote it to a staging or production environment.

Benefits

EASeJ offers several benefits.

  • Quickly deliver new applications or application changes. EASeJ provides a simplified end-to-end cloud-native experience, from code development to production and monitoring with built-in best practices for CI/CD, high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR), and security.

  • Get a flexible modernization destination for existing enterprise applications with support for multiple Java EE, Jakarta EE, and MicroProfile versions and integration with modernization tools as well as IBM MQ and Db2 services.

  • Ensure business security and compliance targets are met. Source code and dependency scanning runs on certified and CIS benchmarked IBM middleware.

  • Reduce costs. EASeJ provides the lightweight, efficient, cloud-optimized Liberty runtime with SaaS pricing.

How it works

EASeJ provides two instance configuration options for paid subscriptions.

Build, deploy and run your application

With the build, deploy, and run your application option, you provide a GitHub organization and application source code in a GitHub source repository. If you don't have application source code, EASeJ provides a sample source GitHub repo to add to your GitHub org. You use EASeJ to build your application, and can modify and build your application until the built application is ready for deployment.

EASeJ provides a GitHub configuration repository to add to your GitHub organization. The application deployment configuration in the config repo controls deployments.

EASeJ runs release builds and validates your application. You submit config repo pull requests to run deployment jobs that promote the application to runtime environments. You can integrate services for logging, monitoring metrics, and connecting to workloads that are hosted on premises or other locations that your VPC can access. On IBM Cloud, you also can integrate services for IBM MQ messaging and a Db2 database in the runtime environments.

The previous information about the build, deploy, and run option is shown in the following diagram.


Enterprise Application Service architecture diagram that shows the user GitHub repositories, the build environment, and the staging and production deployment environments with integration services for logs, monitoring, IBM MQ, and Db2
Deploy and run your application

The deploy and run your application option is similar to the build, deploy and run option. It differs in that you provide an existing prebuilt enterprise archive (EAR), web archive (WAR), or ZIP file in a Maven artifact repository and use EASeJ to deploy the application to a staging or production environment, or to both environments.

As with the build, deploy and run option, you use the application deployment configuration in the config repo to control deployments. EASeJ runs release builds and validates your application. You submit config repo pull requests to run deployment jobs that promote the application to runtime environments. You can integrate services for logging, monitoring metrics, and connecting to workloads that are hosted on premises or other locations that your VPC can access. On IBM Cloud, you also can integrate services for IBM MQ messaging and a Db2 database in the runtime environments.

The previous information about the deploy and run option is shown in the following diagram.


Enterprise Application Service architecture diagram that shows a Maven artifact repository with your application, your GitHub org and config repo, an EASeJ instance with the staging and production deployment environments and with integration services for logs, monitoring, IBM MQ, and Db2

With both options, you control deployments. The application deployment configuration is in the GitHub configuration repository in your GitHub organization. Change the application deployment configuration for the staging or production environments to deploy or undeploy specific application versions, manage resources and variables, configure service bindings, and specify application endpoints. Use observability services to view logs and to monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot your cloud infrastructure and application.

Get started

Read about prerequisites. Then, follow the instructions to create and configure your EASeJ instance.