By now you should all know that Quarkus 1.0 is out! Congratulations to the entire community team who have taken an initial idea we had in early 2018 through a public release almost a year later and then to a 1.0 only about 8 months after that. This is a significant milestone for everyone involved and particularly for helping to make Java relevant in the modern Kubernetes world. If you’ve been involved in this, whether as a contributor of code, raising issues, tweeting your opinions etc. then you should all take a bow!

I've seen frameworks and stacks come and go over the decades, with some of them being massively successful for their time. However, whether it's DCE, CORBA, JBoss itself, Spring ... I've never seen anything quite like Quarkus in terms of almost instantaneous popularity, the ability to capture the imagination of people, mine a deep-rooted need for Java developers and to create a new wave: true Kubernetes native Java middleware. As several people (non-Red Hatters/non-JBossians) have said, it truly feels like "a paradigm shift". It enables developers to bring their Java skills to Kubernetes and feel like they can be as productive (more productive) than developers using other languages.

I’m not going to repeat what I’ve already said about Quarkus technically in previous entries (go look if you haven’t seen them). However, I did want to make something clearer: the secret to Quarkus isn't re-architecting so many of the most popular Java frameworks and stacks, it’s not our work around OpenJDK Hotspot, it’s not how we use GraalVM (SubstrateVM), it’s not Eclipse MicroProfile use, it’s not a focus on serverless or Developer Joy, etc. There is no one thing that has really captured the attention of the community. It’s all of these and more, which in many ways makes the relatively short period of time Quarkus has been “alive” so much more impressive for what has been accomplished.

Now 1.0 isn’t the end of the road by any means! The community has great aspirations and goals ahead of them. We want to appeal to the broadest possible range of Java developers (ok, maybe other JVM languages too on a case by case basis). I won’t spoil the surprises to come (though since everything we’re doing is public, it’s not hard to find out). But suffice it to say I expect to see more around MicroProfile adoption and influence, more integration with Kubernetes/Knative/Istio etc., tooling improvements, FaaS, …

And of course another future step is to a fully supported product and for Quarkus to be used in other products, e.g., Red Hat Integration (where Camel-K will reside, for instance) and Red Hat Automation (where Kogito will reside). Busy times ahead but also exciting times!