When people talk about bringing Java workloads to the cloud, they may think specifically about writing new applications or using a particular architectural style. But most organizations have applications at all stages of the journey to cloud, so focusing on only part of the story ignores some of the challenges facing today’s developers. We at Java runtimes work at IBM building our Java distribution which is called IBM Semeru Runtimes. In this talk, we’re going to take you through the strategy our team follows to build enhancements for all kinds of Java workloads. But one point that we’re going to make is that Java runtimes cannot really afford to leave any *performance metric* behind either. Because for every metric, from startup to memory footprint to latency, there’s some workload where that metric is more important than other metrics (usually while still caring about the others). So this is a bit of a different kind of talk from the ones we normally give and maybe that you typically see: we are going to focus so much on how various Java enhancements fit and work together to improve many performance metrics simultaneously.