BellSoft built a business around the part of Java most companies would rather not think about. Its pitch is simple: one engineering team for the runtime, the Linux layer and the container - with fewer licensing surprises and fewer vulnerabilities to chase.

Alexander Belokrylov is co-founder and CEO of BellSoft, the San Jose company behind Liberica JDK and Alpaquita Linux. After nearly thirteen years inside Sun Microsystems and Oracle - shipping Java ME Embedded, evangelizing Java SE, running pieces of Oracle's IoT Cloud - he left in 2017 with a group of OpenJDK engineers and started building a downstream Java distribution that now runs on millions of servers and ships inside Spring's own quickstart.