JBoss EAP 7.3 brings new packaging capabilities

In addition to a huge set of new features and improvements, the release of Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7.3 provides innovative packaging capabilities. In this article, I will highlight two of these new capabilities and demonstrate their benefits: splitting images into build versus runtimes, and configuration trimming with Galleon.

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Separating build versus runtime images

The traditional containerization of JBoss EAP images consists of running an S2I build, which combines a base JBoss EAP image (containing everything in EAP) with the application build. This old way of doing things results in a final image that has a lot of unnecessary stuff in it, such as build tools like Maven and S2I tooling.

In JBoss EAP 7.3, there are new, slimmed-down runtime images that can be built in a pipeline as a chained build so that the final image is much smaller and doesn’t contain all of the tooling needed at build time. This behavior offers a smaller image size and saves costs for network bandwidth and storage.

Trimming with Galleon

You can now customize the main JBoss EAP for OpenShift image configuration to include only the capabilities that you require, thereby reducing the memory footprint and startup times. The provisioning tool, Galleon, offers several layers that you can select to control the capabilities present in the JBoss EAP server. This server contains several supported and pre-defined Galleon layers, and developers and operations teams can create custom layers they can use to add small parts of functionality in a repeatable way.

These two features provide many benefits, which are outlined in the demo video. Check it out, and be sure to try JBoss EAP 7.3 and discover many other awesome new features and improvements!