I was recently impressed by Spring Boot's native images feature. I considered sharing some information about native images.

I created two simple Spring Boot projects
1) spring-with-native-plugin
2) spring-without-native-plugin

Apart from the Main class, I used the same controller in both projects.

I used the following command to create docker images.

mvn spring-boot:build-image 

(Both projects are based on maven)

When I ran both docker images, I was surprised by the application startup time.

There's also a significant difference in the sizes of the two Docker images.

So, What happened after we installed the native plugin?

• Thanks to Spring AOT Process, it performed a code analysis to identify unnecessary code.
• After the code analysis, all unnecessary code was removed, and a native image was created.

Now, This native image is no longer dependent on the JVM and can run without the JVM.

We must thank @graalvmfor making this all possible.