I’ve been playing with GraalVM AOT compilation capability since I became aware of it. As a long-time Spring aficionado, I carefully monitored the efforts that the engineers at Tanzu have put into making Spring AOT-compatible. Recently, they announced the beta version of the integration. In this post, I want to check how easy it is to produce a (working!) Docker image from an existing Spring Boot application. Introduction GraalVM provides many different features.

The last two blog posts were focused on how to write a custom Kubernetes controller in Java. As usual, I’m writing a demo along with the posts: that allows me to face real issues, and be able to detail them. In this context, I had to handle a couple of them when implementing the demo code. This post is dedicated to one of them: the compilation of not-compatible Java code with Graal VM’s native image AOT compilation.

I’ve been following GraalVM with a lot of interest. One of the interesting areas is its ability to compile bytecode Ahead-Of-Time, and create a native image. Such images have a lot of advantages, including small size, no dependency on a JRE, etc. However, AOT has some limitations. In particular, the native image executable cannot compile what it doesn’t know about. This post aims to describe how to configure the compilation process when code is using reflection.