Can you expand on the comment about Kubernetes and VMs?
I don't know much about Kubernetes but AFAIK people just put a jar file and JVM in the container image and run it just like any other server app. The jar files can get big (100+ MB) if you have lots of deps, but not to the extent that container image size would be problematic in normal server app environments.
Well JAR files are that big because many java devs import libraries that they never use and you end up with 100+ dependencies when you really need 10. Clojure (Maven) has a way of dealing with this using :exclusions. My typical jar files are 10 - 50MB which are manageable today very well.
I don't know much about Kubernetes but AFAIK people just put a jar file and JVM in the container image and run it just like any other server app. The jar files can get big (100+ MB) if you have lots of deps, but not to the extent that container image size would be problematic in normal server app environments.