Orignally posted at Red Hat Developers
A Java runtime environment should be able to run compiled source code, whereas a development kit, for example, OpenJDK, would include all the libraries/binaries to compile and run the source code. Essentially the latter is a superset of the runtime environment. More details on OpenJDK support and lifecycle can be found here.
Red Hat ships and supports container images with OpenJDK for both Java 8 and 11. More details are here. If you are using Red Hat Middleware, the s2i images shipped are also useful to deploy, for example, on Red Hat Openshift Container Platform.
