Today we are excited to announce the general availability of the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK, a new no-cost distribution of OpenJDK that is open source and available for free for anyone to deploy anywhere. As we said previously when we announced the Preview of the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK, Java is heavily used by Microsoft with more than 500,000 JVMs running internally. The Java Engineering Group is very proud to contribute back to the Java ecosystem and help power workloads such as LinkedIn, Minecraft, and Azure!

It includes binaries for Java 11, based on OpenJDK 11.0.11 and OpenJDK 16.0.1 for x64 server and desktop environments on macOS, Linux, and Windows. We are also publishing a new Early Access binary for Java 16 for Linux and Windows on ARM.

This new Java 16 release is already in use by millions of Minecraft players, with the latest Minecraft Java Edition Snapshot version 21W19A, which has been updated to bundle a Java 16 runtime based on the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK.

Visit microsoft.com/openjdk to learn more and download the binaries.

Container Images

With general availability, we are also releasing Microsoft Build of OpenJDK Docker images and corresponding Dockerfiles. These are designed to be used by any Java applications or Java application components for deployment anywhere, including Microsoft Azure.

To pull the latest image for a specific tag, use the following command:

$ docker pull mcr.microsoft.com/openjdk/jdk:<tag>

To find out more, please see the container images guide.

Support

OpenJDK 11 releases of the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK are Long-Term Supported (LTS) and will receive free quarterly updates, available through microsoft.com/openjdk.

Microsoft Build of OpenJDK binaries may contain fixes and enhancements or backported fixes and backported enhancements that we deem important to our customers and our internal users but that have not been (and may not be) incorporated in the upstream OpenJDK project due to decisions outside of Microsoft’s control. Fixes and enhancements that have not yet been formally upstreamed will be clearly signposted in our release notes with source code available.

Read our full support policy to find out more.

New Documentation Hub for Java at Microsoft

Today we are also excited to announce the new Java Development with Microsoft documentation hub: docs.microsoft.com/java. The hub brings together all of the resources you need to learn how to develop Java applications and services with Microsoft technologies.