Develop, deploy and run your Java applications anywhere with Liberty
Overview
Enterprise-ready modern Java
Liberty is a Java application server, designed for the enterprise. It offers enterprise-grade security, observability, stability and performance. Keeping up to date with the latest release is made simple with Liberty Zero Migration. Liberty offers unrivaled flexibility and versatility, making it much easier to manage applications.
Features
One runtime, any environment
Liberty delivers a consistent cloud-native experience from development through production. Liberty runs on bare metal, VMs and containers across on-prem, public and private clouds. Liberty provides a common foundation for modernized and new WebSphere workloads. This consistency reduces operational complexity and gives teams the flexibility to deploy, move and scale applications without refactoring.
WebSphere Liberty is continuously updated with the latest Java, Jakarta EE and MicroProfile capabilities, ensuring applications remain current without disruptive upgrades. Its zero-migration approach allows applications to run unchanged as the runtime evolves, so teams can adopt new features, performance improvements and security fixes incrementally and on their own timelines. Regular updates help maintain security and compliance, while reducing the operational burden traditionally associated with platform upgrades.
The result is a runtime that stays modern and secure over time, without forcing costly rewrites or interrupting business-critical applications.
WebSphere Liberty is engineered for high performance and efficiency, delivering fast startup times, low memory consumption and strong throughput for enterprise Java workloads. Its lightweight, modular architecture ensures only the required features are loaded, reducing overhead and improving responsiveness. Liberty is optimized for modern infrastructure, enabling higher density in containers and Kubernetes environments while scaling efficiently under load. This performance profile helps organizations improve application responsiveness, maximize infrastructure utilization and reduce overall operational costs.
Liberty Tools helps you iterate quickly with Liberty dev mode, code with assistance for MicroProfile and Jakarta EE APIs and easily edit Liberty configuration files. WebSphere Liberty is designed to make developers productive from day one, with simple configuration, fast feedback loops and strong integration with modern development tools. Features such as rapid startup, hot reload and clear runtime diagnostics streamline local development and testing.
Liberty supports modern Java and Jakarta EE standards and frameworks, enabling teams to build cloud-native applications using familiar APIs while maintaining enterprise-grade reliability. By reducing friction across the development lifecycle, Liberty helps developers focus more time on building value and less on managing the runtime.
Use cases
Cloud-native microservices
Modern monolithic Java applications
Modernizing existing WebSphere and Java EE workloads
Container and Kubernetes deployments
Agentic AI applications
Any application, anywhere
Liberty is a lightweight, cloud-native runtime for building and deploying microservices. It supports MicroProfile and Jakarta EE, which makes it a strong fit for REST services, health checks, metrics, fault tolerance and containerized deployments.
Liberty is suitable not only for microservices, but also for modern monoliths. That makes it useful when you want a simpler, faster Java application server without fully decomposing an application into microservices.
Liberty is an ideal cloud-native runtime for modernizing traditional monolithic workloads. Easily move applications from traditional WebSphere Application Server to Liberty’s container-ready, operationally modern runtime.
Liberty is designed for containerized environments, so it is commonly used when organizations want to run Java workloads in Docker/Kubernetes or as part of broader hybrid cloud platforms. IBM describes it as “container-ready” and suitable for cloud deployment patterns.
Liberty integrates with Langchain4j and the new specification langchain4j-cdi to in support of agentic and AI-infused applications to be build and deployed.
Integrations
Build faster with your favorite IDEs
IBM WebSphere Liberty integrates with Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ and Eclipse to streamline development, debugging and deployment of Java applications.
Case studies
Explore Liberty in action
SOMPO Holdings
SOMPO Holdings, a 130-year-old Japanese insurance giant, faced challenges with its strained and costly mainframe system due to technical debt and organic growth. IBM helped modernize their legacy COBOL system using IBM WebSphere Liberty, simplifying infrastructure administration, improving developer productivity and reducing costs. The solution included IBM WebSphere Liberty and IBM Modernization Tooling. This transformation streamlined operations, achieving significant efficiency gains.
54%
CPU core reduction
33%
memory reduction
