Chapter 1. What is Open Liberty

Open Liberty is a lightweight Java runtime for building cloud-native applications and microservices.

With Open Liberty, it’s easy to add and remove modular features from the latest versions of Jakarta EE and Eclipse MicroProfile. This modular structure simplifies microservice development, enabling you to run Just enough Application Server to support the features that your application needs. Furthermore, with Open Liberty zero migration architecture, you can upgrade to the latest version with minimal impact to your current applications and configurations. Open Liberty is compatible with the Jakarta EE 8 Full Platform and Web Profile specifications and with MicroProfile 3.0. For more information, see the Open Liberty website. For the latest updates about Open Liberty features and capabilities, see the Open Liberty blog and Open Liberty docs.

Open Liberty is one of the Java runtimes available on OpenShift, and support is provided as part of a Red Hat subscription. Run Open Liberty on OpenShift to build and deploy cloud-native applications with the benefits of the OpenShift platform. For more information about using Open Liberty with OpenShift, see Deploying microservices to OpenShift.

1.1. Open Liberty Versioning

Traditional versioning follows some variation of the major.minor.micro scheme, where significant new function is only delivered in a major release. These major releases contain key new capabilities, but they also make behavior changes that require application migration and significant regression testing to adopt. As a result, multiple major versions are supported at any one time. The modular feature architecture of Open Liberty, in combination with zero migration, allows the delivery of new function incrementally, without following a major.minor.micro versioning scheme.

Instead of major releases, each Open Liberty release is considered a micro, or patch release. These patch releases follow a yy.0.0.nn version scheme. The first two digits indicate the year of release and the last two digits indicate the number of the release within that year. Even though the first set of digits changes each year, the releases are of equal standing. For example, the difference between 20.0.0.1 (the first release of 2020) and 19.0.0.12 (the last release of 2019) is identical to the difference between 19.0.0.10 and 19.0.0.11.

The lack of major release streams is unusual for server runtimes, but is common for desktop and mobile applications. Some publication systems expect software to have a major version. As a result, in cases where a major version is needed, the year of publication is used as a stand-in. For example, Open Liberty documentation that is published for this guide in 2019 uses the year 2019 as the version number. However, this documentation is as applicable to releases in 2020 as it is to releases in 2019.