Web applications

With its focus on performance, JVM is a very popular choice for web applications. When built correctly, applications can scale really well, if needed across many different servers.

JVM is a well-understood platform, meaning that it is predictable. Plus, it provides many tools to debug and profile problematic applications. Because of its open nature, monitoring of JVM internals is also possible. For web applications that have to serve thousands of users concurrently, this is an important advantage.

JVM already plays a huge role in the cloud. Popular examples of companies that use JVM for core parts of their cloud-based services include Twitter (famously using Scala), Amazon, Spotify, and Netflix. The actual list is much larger.