Alasdair Nottingham, Graham Charters and Tim Ellison provide insights into the WAS, Liberty and Java roadmap.
Q&A from the call:
Question: If monolithic styles is gaining popularity again, is tWAS kept as part of the Ibm portfolio, beyond java 8? Or will liberty be handling
Answer: For future or modernization of monoliths, 'macroservices', microservices, our recommendation is Liberty.
WAS remains a critical part of our clients infrastructure - that will likely evolve over time to be more based on Liberty than traditional WAS, but we also expect traditional WAS to remain important to clients for a very long time
Question: how long would WAS Classic be part of the CP4Apps Portfolio. my understanding is that IBM would provide standard support from WAS 8.5.5.x to 9.0.5.x etc
Answer: We are supporting traditional WAS + Java 8 till at least 2030, with extended support to 2033.
We also recommend that if you are thinking about going to WAS 9.0.5 to consider instead to apply that effort to migrate to Liberty.
The 2030 support is to give clients time to adopt Liberty, time to modernize (however they chose to) and time to run their existing workloads "as-is", "as needed"
Most of the IBM products that incuded WAS in the past have shifted to Liberty, but not all.
Question: About the pause less garbage collector: can this be considered a default jvm setting like actually gencon is the most used? And how I can enable it on IBMJ9 and OpenJ9?
Answer: the pause-less garbage collector is NOT a default jvm setting.
Question: what is the plan for TLS1.3. Which version supports TLS1.3
Answer: yes, we plan to deliver TLSv1.3 on both 8.5.5 and 9.0.5 but we do not have a date to share at this time.
Question: Is Java 11 expected to support tWAS in the future?
Answer: We have no plans to support tWAS on Java 11 because that will introduce a migration for existing applications.
Question: So there will be no possibility of having a Java selectable between Java 8 and 11 .. correct?
Answer: Correct. Most customers using traditional WebSphere want us to help them keep those applications running an secure with minimal unnecessary work. For applications that want to exploit Java 11 and beyond and new MicroProfile capabilities, for example, we recommend migration to Liberty.
Question: Does it matter which TA results we provide, the one from the WAS admin console, or the full blown version. I understand that there may be different results or the version in the console does not capture as much information?
Answer: no, the same scanner is used for both scenarios. The zips produced by Transformation Advisor are most useful for the TA/Liberty analysis. If you’d like to share the output for analysis, please contact claudiab@us.ibm.com
Question: I noticed there is no IBM Java 11.
Answer: That's correct. We do not have an IBM SDK for Java 11. That is by design, because of the OpenJDK strategy Tim shared.
Question: what is the plan for the clients that run Java 7 on 8.5.5.x and below. They need to install Java 8 manually. Would Transformation Advisor provide migration to liberty in this context?
Answer: Newer versions of WAS 8.5.5 default to Java 8 in their installation. Java 7 will EOS on July 2022, so clients are strongly encouraged to move to Java 8 ASAP
Question: On the docker.ci github project on wasdev I noticed there is no IBM Java 11 for WebSphere Liberty, the only way is to create container with Openj9 with Websphere Liberty, is this correct? If yes is this a supported scenario in case I open a service request?
https://github.com/WASdev/ci.docker/tree/master/ga/20.0.0.3/kernel
Answer: For Java 11 and beyond, we support the AdoptOpenJDK builds of OpenJ9. You can build your own images and still get support. You'll need to be on a supported Java and supported OS, of course.
Question: For applications running in tWAS (ND) and looking at running in WAS in OpenShift. Is there a migration tool that takes what's in ND tWAS over to WAS in Openshift?
Answer: Yes! We actually had a demo for some new capabilities to Transformation Advisor at THINK.
https://mediacenter.ibm.com/media/t/1_muwgsomq?cm_sp=CloudThinkReferrals-_-CloudPlatform-_--_-Demo
Question: For running WAS in Openshift, is Cloud Pack for app needed? or just recommeded because it comes with pre-built in features?
Answer: There is a really good presentation from Chris Bailey around these themes: https://community.ibm.com/community/user/imwuc/viewdocument/why-cloud-pak-for-apps?CommunityKey=1348d157-c61b-417f-928a-179c3d0ffccb&tab=librarydocuments