Payara Platform Enterprise Vs GlassFish

Running GlassFish in production? It’s likely you are facing challenges due to the lack of support, lack of automation assistance, inability to quickly browse metrics, and the lack of modern security standards support – among other things! Keep reading to see if you recognize the common problems people experience with GlassFish in their production environments. It’s possible you didn’t think there was an alternative and that these issues were unavoidable. However, if you see yourself and your business in these issues, there is another way! There is a solution to these common GlassFish problems that you maybe haven’t heard of yet.

DevOps is usually one of the most coveted topics for any organisation: The need to automate the integration and delivery of all aspects of your applications and their dependencies is a constant requirement in most projects.

The Asadmin Recorder is a powerful feature that is available in the Web administration console of Payara Server, and when enabled, allows the server administrator to record all of the operations that change the configuration of an existing domain into a localised script file that can be later used to automate the server configuration without worrying about suddenly making mistakes.

Thanks to the recorder, every time you may want to automate the steps to configure your domain, simply turn it on, proceed to configure all the settings needed, grab the local file and adapt it to run by your DevOps tools (Chef, Ansible, Jenkins, etc.).

You can read more about this feature in the official Payara Server Community documentation.

When running on Payara Enterprise in production there is no extra installation or configuration needed.

It consists of a server module responsible for collecting a multitude of metrics from all nodes which are accumulated on the DAS to feed data to its frontend which visualises the data as a web-application deployed on the DAS.

The metrics include server metrics from different sources within the server as well as metrics defined in user applications using MicroProfile Metrics and metrics derived from MicroProfile Health checks.

You can read more about this feature in the official Payara Insight documentation.

Request Tracing in the Payara Platform helps you understand the cause of slow application performance. It’s compatible with the MicroProfile OpenTracing specification so you can use any data generated in any OpenTracing tool (such as Zipkin and Jaeger).

Payara Server provides the Health Check Service for automatic self-monitoring in order to detect future problems as soon as possible. When enabled, the Health Check Service periodically checks some low level metrics. Whenever it detects that a threshold is not met, it triggers alert notifications that allow to detect undesired behaviour and predict possible failures. All of these automatic checks are very lightweight and run with a negligible impact on performance.

Notification Service works in the background to allow services such as JMX Monitoring, Payara Health Check, and Request Tracing to send messages to the notifiers.

These Docker images can be used as-is to run your applications on Payara Server or Payara Micro (the Payara Platform). Or you can create your own Docker images based on them. Check out the following resources to learn more about using the Payara Platform with Docker.

Docker images for Payara Platform Community Edition are available on DockerHub, while customers can access Payara Enterprise Docker Images in our Nexus repository under the repo ‘payara-docker’.

The Payara Platform Enterprise is a fully-supported open source software for enterprises offering a strong tool set of security features so you won’t have to implement your own security measures from scratch,  enabling reliable and secure deployments of Jakarta EE and MicroProfile applications on premises, in the cloud, or hybrid environments.

Making the platform secure and providing useful built-in security tools for application developers and production administrators is an essential part of the platform development process and is accomplished with monthly releases, security fixes, critical security patches, and a 10-year software lifecycle. The Payara Platform also provides tools to secure and restrict access to a production system, encrypt communication, and audit security events and configuration changes.

Read more on our Security page.