A lightly edited transcript of our interview with Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro, Senior Director of Product Management at Oracle.

What is the significance of Java in today’s cloud native world?
Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro: Java, although some people may not know this, is the number one development language for the Cloud. I would love to be able to take credit and say, “Oh yeah, we’ve been working really diligently to make Java perform perfectly with the cloud; we predicted the Cloud.”

In reality, the characteristics that make Java a very robust and good language for the enterprises are indeed the same characteristics that allow us to produce something that’s really good for the Cloud as well. For example, Java has been multithreaded from the beginning. Java runs in many different environments and it isolates you, if you will, from the hardware.

An application written in Java will work pretty well with different operating systems, different platforms on large servers, on smaller servers. And even though most servers now are pretty big, when you start constraining your systems you realize that you are going to run it on a device that’s constrained by processor and memory. That’s something we have been trying to target with smaller devices 25 years ago. So we’ve in part by luck and in part by making good decisions, landed on a situation where Java is uniquely well suited for today’s modern environments.