Qualification for Alibaba (Why Alibaba)

Alibaba started engineering investments on OpenJDK early back to 2010. Most of all the application in Alibaba are written in Java, with more than billion lines of Java code and more than 10,000 Java developers. We are in no doubt one of the largest installation base of Java in the world. We customize OpenJDK to meet the needs of rapidly growing business. Thousands of thousands of JVM instances are running Java every second, serving huge number of web requests and transacting Alibaba's full spectrum of services, including world's largest online ecommerce, financial and logistics marketplaces. Alibaba will continue to innovate Java infrastructure technology based on OpenJDK. We hope to bring our insights and experiences in using Java in super large-scale datacenter to Java ecosystem by deeply involved in OpenJDK community.

Value and perspective brought to the EC/ Interests in the JCP program (Community)

Alibaba has a strong record of open source and community involvement. We custom-build most of its software based on rich Java open-source ecosystem and we also contribute them back to community, including jStorm, fastJSON etc. We have two OpenJDK committers, another one in expert group in JSR 353.

We believe Alibaba sitting on EC would be important to help to ensure Java community, both in terms of geography and technologies. Given Alibaba's leading role in China, indeed globally, Alibaba is willing to represent the voices of Java developer in EC discussion in broader way. From technology perspective, as a member of JCP, Alibaba puts particular focus on ways to advance the role of Java in the web-scale area. We try everything possible to enhance the Java technology to fulfill our requirements, from underlying JVM runtime, Java middleware, up to different aspects of JEE.

Current and planned participation (JSR's participation on Expert Groups) (Contribution)

Alibaba already built and deployed customized OpenJDK with our specific changes. We optimize OpenJDK for online e-Commerce applications running on 100,000 servers. Many of these enhancements and improvements are generally applicable to most workloads, we are planning to cooperate with OpenJDK community and contribute back such changes. Specifically, we are planning to contribute Java warmup technology (similar to Zing^TM ReadyNow) which is already implemented in our customized OpenJDK version, widely used in Alibaba datacenter as JEP to OpenJDK, moreover, we commit to contribute to newly launched OpenJDK project loom, our customized OpenJDK version already implemented similar mechanism proposed by project loom. We believe our experiences on co-routine technology which is already widely deployed and used in Alibaba datacenter will definitely bring values to OpenJDK.

Alibaba Position Statement (.pdf file)

Kingsum Chow is the chief scientist of system software hardware co-optimization. He has over 15 years of optimizing Java performance in collaboration with Appeal, IBM, BEA, Sun and Oracle JVM teams while working at Intel. In 2016, he joined Alibaba to improve Java performance in the data center. Kingsum has been issued more than 20 patents. He also has delivered more than 90 papers and presentations. Kingsum appeared four times in JavaOne keynotes and almost a dozen times in JavaOne and Oracle OpenWorld presentations covering the topic of software performance systems and optimization. Kingsum received a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1996.