For many Java developers, moving a legacy application to the cloud feels like climbing a mountain of YAML. But Azul and Payara’s Qube offering is removing the friction—bringing one-click deployment, security, and performance gains to even the most complex J2EE workloads.

“Qube is a developer productivity tool,” explains George Gould, Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Partner Alliances at Azul. “It abstracts away the complexity of containerizing and deploying Java applications to Kubernetes.” With Qube, a developer can take a JAR or WAR file and have it running in Kubernetes in under 15 seconds—without editing a single line of code or manually configuring deployment manifests.

At the heart of Qube is a smart containerization process that leverages either standard Docker Hub images or hardened containers from vendors like RapidFort and Chainguard. This multi-pronged approach helps enterprises migrate securely, reducing vulnerabilities not only in the application but in the container infrastructure itself.

But performance and cost containment are where the Azul partnership shines. Gould points to the integration of Azul’s Platform Core and Platform Prime during containerization. “Platform Prime, powered by the Zing JVM, is like a turbocharger for your Java app,” he says. “If you’re running an e-commerce platform, trading engine, or ad server—you care about throughput, latency, and speed. Zing delivers.”

Organizations that prioritize performance can see measurable top-line improvements—more transactions, faster response times, higher uptime. For those focused on efficiency, Prime helps reduce infrastructure costs by up to 25%. “Maybe you were running on 10,000 vCores—we can bring that down to 8,000 or less, without changing KPIs,” says Gould.

This kind of outcome-driven tooling is rare, especially in the Kubernetes world where developer experience is often sacrificed for operational flexibility. Qube flips the script. It empowers developers, reduces cloud migration risk, and delivers ROI—all without refactoring.

Azul’s JVMs are well-known for their performance tuning capabilities, and with this integration, they become instantly accessible to any Java developer moving to the cloud. “Our JVMs go to 11,” Gould jokes—referring to the extra capacity for performance gains or cost reductions that can be unlocked simply by swapping runtimes.

For companies facing stalled modernization initiatives, Qube provides a way forward: one that respects developer time, avoids rewriting legacy code, and delivers business results from day one.