Support for GraalVM

We have plans to use GraalVM https://www.graalvm.org/ for some of our microservices. Especially for cloud native applications GraalVM is a very interesting project. Spring Boot is working on supporting GraalVM with spring-native project: https://github.com/spring-projects-experimental/spring-native

We plan to adopt services to the tech stack but monitoring and tracing is mandatory for us before we can adopt to it.

• The use-case for using GraalVM
  GraalVM is a high performance runtime for the Java platform. It allows to create native binaries for Java applications. It helps to improve application through put and latency and because of the native images and the static weaving required for supporting the native image also a significant improve on startup time. Fast start up times are important for services where fast scale in/scale out on demand is required.

• The version in use
  Depending on GA of spring native (https://github.com/spring-projects-experimental/spring-native) and the supported GraalVM versions

• The timeline for rolling it out
  As soon as spring native (https://github.com/spring-projects-experimental/spring-native) is GA we would consider the first service to migrate.

• The impact of not having Instana support for it
  Not having support for GraalVM monitoring and tracing by Instana would mean that we cannot monitor the services properly and do not get complete application traces. If no GraalVM support is provided we have to either rethink using GraalVM/Spring Native or find a way how to get the relevant metrics and traces into Instana or search for a replacement for Instana.