The newest Jakarta EE update enhances enterprise Java with easier data access, improved testing workflows, and features tailored for cloud-native apps.
DevOps Waste Is Crippling Java Teams—and Innovation
Your DevOps teams could be squandering over half their time on work that brings zero business value. According to findings from our 2025 State of Java Survey & Report, 62% of organizations say dead code is slowing their DevOps productivity. Meanwhile, 33% admit their teams waste more than half their time chasing false-positive security alerts. Even more concerning: 72% of companies are paying for cloud capacity they never actually use. These aren’t isolated inefficiencies—they’re systemic problems draining enterprise resources.
This is more than just operational clutter—it’s a hidden innovation tax silently eroding your competitive edge. After 25 years working with Java, from the early days of JDK 1.0 to the current enterprise ecosystem, I’ve seen these inefficiencies become the number one obstacle to agility and progress. With nearly 70% of companies running more than half their apps on Java, this isn’t some fringe issue. It’s an enterprise-wide crisis hiding in plain sight.
Three Pillars of DevOps Debt
The first issue is code bloat—what we call digital hoarding. Dead code may seem harmless, but it creates ripple effects far beyond disk space. It leads to tangled codebases, longer onboarding, and extended dev cycles. Our research shows organizations with high levels of dead code experience development cycles that are, on average, 35% longer. Worse yet, some companies are still running production workloads on Java 6—an obsolete version last updated in 2018. Legacy code and platforms like these compound the problem and make modernization efforts harder.
Next is the endless chase of security false positives. While the “better safe than sorry” philosophy has its place, the result in many Java teams is alert fatigue. One-third of DevOps teams spend most of their time chasing non-issues. In Java environments, where 41% of companies report critical security issues weekly or even daily, this creates a paradox: teams are overwhelmed, yet real vulnerabilities still slip through. The ongoing presence of Log4j-related flaws, despite years of public attention, is proof. Our data suggests 70% of security alerts in Java apps are tied to unreachable or non-executing code paths—noise that drowns out the real threats.
Cloud Waste: The Financial Burden
Finally, the costliest form of DevOps debt is cloud waste. Many Java teams over-provision cloud resources to stay on the safe side, resulting in massive inefficiencies. In fact, two-thirds of organizations report that over half of their cloud costs come from Java workloads. But here’s the kicker: simply tuning Java Virtual Machine (JVM) configurations could cut cloud spend by 25% to 30%. When you zoom out, that waste adds up to over $10 billion annually in unused cloud capacity across Java-powered enterprises.
All of this—dead code, false positives, cloud waste—amounts to an invisible tax on innovation. It’s time to take a hard look at how Java teams operate and invest in tools and practices that remove this debt before it buries your ability to compete.