What is Spring Boot native image (GraalVM) and why is it used?

Native images compile Spring Boot apps into platform-specific executables with faster startup and lower memory usage.

GraalVM Native Image compiles Java applications ahead-of-time into machine code, removing JVM startup overhead. Spring Boot 3+ supports native compilation using Spring AOT processing, which analyzes beans, configurations, and reflection usage at build time. This significantly improves cold start performance, especially for serverless and cloud environments, but reduces runtime flexibility like reflection and dynamic class loading.