Solving Cold Starts: Uses Istio to Warm Up Java Pods, with Frédéric Gaudet

If you're running Java applications in Kubernetes, you've likely experienced the pain of slow pod startups affecting user experience during deployments and scaling events.

Frédéric Gaudet, Senior SRE at BlaBlaCar, shares how his team solved the cold start problem for their 1,500 Java microservices using Istio's warm-up capabilities.

You will learn:

• Why Java applications struggle with cold starts and how JIT compilation affects initial request latency in Kubernetes environments

• How Istio's warm-up feature works to gradually ramp up traffic to new pods

• Why other common solutions fail, including resource over-provisioning, init containers, and tools like GraalVM

• Real production impact from implementing this solution, including dramatic improvements in message moderation SLOs at BlaBlaCar's scale of 4,000 pods

Sponsor

This episode is brought to you by Testkube—the ultimate Continuous Testing Platform for Cloud Native applications. Scale fast, test continuously, and ship confidently. Check it out at testkube.io

More info

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