Stop Writing YAML: How to Define, Test, and Deploy Your Cloud in Pure Java

Tue, 12 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

1. Introduction

As Java developers, we apply rigorous engineering practices to application code: type safety, unit testing, refactoring, code review. Then we switch to deploying that code and write hundreds of lines of YAML, accepting the lack of expressiveness, missing abstractions, and missing flexibility as the cost of doing business. Or worse, we log into the cloud console and click our way through to the deployment.

This article explores an alternative: defining cloud infrastructure in Java, with the same tools and practices we use for application code. We’ll build a working example, a Java service deployed on AWS, covering the full lifecycle from resource definition through testing to CI/CD. While this example uses Quarkus, the infrastructure patterns demonstrated here apply equally for Spring Boot, Jakarta EE, or any other containerized Java framework. The companion code is available at github.com/wlami/stop-writing-yaml-javapro.

Wladi Mitzel on JAVAPRO International

Stop Writing YAML: How to Define, Test, and Deploy Your Cloud in Pure Java

1. Introduction