Payara introduced Payara Cloud, a serverless solution for Jakarta EE applications, which manages the infrastructure configuration and creation. It allows developers to focus on creating and configuring the application before pushing the application's WAR file to the cloud.
Payara Cloud provides the Jakarta EE Runtime, SSL/TLS certificates, monitoring and automatic scaling of the application's Kubernetes containers. Traditional Kubernetes solutions require the configuration and maintenance of infrastructure elements such as routing, certificates and monitoring. Payara Cloud simplifies the infrastructure part and allows developers to focus on developing and configuring the application:
Source: https://www.payara.fish/products/payara-cloud/
Every web application based on the Jakarta EE Web Profile specification can run inside a containerized Payara Micro instance. Payara Micro, also compatible with MicroProfile, allows execution of WAR files from the command line without an installed application server. The Payara Micro runtime is less than 80MB and provides automatic and elastic clustering for containerized Jakarta EE microservices.
Payara Cloud packages the application and Payara Micro runtime in a Docker image and configures the necessary YAML files. After that, it builds the container image, creates a pod and deploys the application on the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) from Microsoft Azure, before configuring the Ingress routing rules and creating an SSL certificate to make the application publicly available.
Payara Cloud provides combined metrics of all applications in the same Kubernetes namespace. Monitoring and diagnostic information is available, for example to retrieve more information about failed deployments.
Security is improved by deploying each application in a separate container while all containers in the same namespace can communicate directly with each other over the network.
Adam Bien, consultant and Java Champion, evaluated Payara Cloud and provided feedback, writing:
What I really like about this approach is, we have Helidon, Quarkus. They try to shift the deployment to the build time. Payara Cloud is completely different. It uses what application servers do the best: the separation of the infrastructure from the business logic.
Payara offers three subscription models for running applications on Microsoft Azure. The basic model provides 4 vCPUs and 8 GB memory for 700 dollars per month, while the standard model provides 16 vCPUs and 32 GB memory with support for multiple custom domains for 2500 dollars per month. Lastly, the premium model provides the same as the standard model and additional Payara Micro Enterprise binaries for local development and support from Payara's support team for $3500 dollars per month. Any additional usage is billed pro-rata per vCPU and per 30 days for all subscriptions.
More information can be found in the Payara Cloud Documentation.