The speaker discusses Quarkus, a framework that uses Java for cloud-native workloads. Traditional Java is designed for long-running applications with high throughput, but in the cloud-native world, applications need to be smaller and have faster startup times. Quarkus aims to provide these benefits by doing as much work as possible during build time, resulting in faster startup times and lower memory usage compared to traditional Java applications. Quarkus also offers features like live coding, continuous testing, and a developer UI to enhance the developer experience. The speaker also explains that Quarkus can be run on the JVM or compiled down to a native binary using GraalVM. The native build provides even faster startup times and lower memory footprint. Quarkus can be used for a variety of applications, including traditional Java applications, event-driven applications, microservices, and serverless functions. The speaker also mentions that Quarkus has compatibility extensions for Spring Boot, making it relatively easy to migrate existing Spring applications to Quarkus.