By Akshai Parthasarathy, Product Marketing, Oracle
Last year, we announced the Cloud Native Framework, with capabilities for running cloud native workloads on-premises, on third-party clouds, and on Oracle Cloud. We’ve made significant progress in the evolution of this framework, both for the Oracle Linux Cloud Native Environment (for on-premises and third-party environments) and Oracle Cloud Native Services (for Oracle Cloud).
Oracle Cloud Native Services let you develop, deploy, and manage next-generation applications that are containerized, serverless, infrastructure expressed as code, and event driven. When combined with observability and messaging capabilities, they enable you to run highly scalable and available modern applications at global enterprise levels.
In 2018, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure had commercial regions in the US, UK, and Germany. We have since expanded coverage to Canada, Switzerland, Brazil (Sao Paulo), India, South Korea, Japan, and Australia, and expect to have 36 regions by the end of 2020. These data regions provide capabilities for disaster recovery that aren’t available from other vendors. And, they provide more choice in more geographies for deploying Cloud Native Services.
We’ve also expanded our partnerships with Microsoft, VMware, SUSE, Ubuntu, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and other vendors. The partnership with Microsoft underscores Oracle’s recognition of multicloud scenarios, including those for managed Kubernetes.
Certified solutions in the Oracle Cloud ecosystem span OS and virtualization, apps and migration, networks and security, data, analytics, AI/ML, and HPC. In addition, the Oracle Cloud Marketplace paid listings enable you to easily launch third-party apps within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Using Oracle Cloud provides the following additional advantages, among others:
•Managed services for improved developer productivity.
•Generation 2 infrastructure that provides superior flexibility, performance, and availability.
•Enterprise-grade, always-on security that collects data from various sources, analyzes it, and kills threats with no human intervention.
•Openness, portability, and interoperability. Cloud Native Services, such as those for Kubernetes and serverless functions, use open source code bases for maximum application portability and interoperability. Oracle has also made MySQL, Java, Oracle VM VirtualBox, Oracle Visual Builder, and other technologies open source, and uses de facto standards wherever possible for your applications to run anywhere.
Announcements for Cloud Native Services
We’re announcing the following Cloud Native Services: Kafka Compatibility for Oracle Streaming, Oracle API Gateway, and Oracle Logging.
Kafka Compatibility for Oracle Streaming
Oracle Streaming was introduced earlier this year as a cloud native messaging platform for Oracle developers. Since its inception, Oracle Cloud Native Services have embraced open source. We’ re announcing the upcoming General Availability (GA) release of compatibility with Apache Kafka, the leading message bus platform for building event-driven applications and real-time big data infrastructure for analytics.
This offering combines the unique value additions of both platforms:
•Use the Kafka ecosystem with the Kafka API, eliminating vendor lock-in.
•Integrate with Oracle Cloud AuthN and AuthZ to fulfill enterprise security needs.
•Pay up to 20-40% less than self-managed Kafka implementations with pay-as-you-go pricing.
API Gateway
API Gateway (in limited availability) is a highly available, fully managed gateway that enables developers to create governed HTTP/S interfaces for other Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services, including Oracle Functions, Container Engine for Kubernetes, and Compute. API Gateway provides policy enforcement through authentication and rate-limiting HTTP/S endpoints. You can learn more about the service from the API Gateway announcement.
Logging
Logging (in limited availability) is a highly scalable log management and analytics platform for all your logs. Logging lets you to ingest and manage logs generated by your resources and applications. You can use the powerful analytics engine to search and analyze logs, and use the intuitive rules engine to act in near real-time on any log event. You can learn more about Logging from the Logging announcement.
Adoption of Oracle Cloud Native Services
Adoption of Oracle Cloud Native Services has grown significantly over the last year. Adopters include scientific organizations, healthcare organizations, large financial services companies, innovative AI-centric startups, logistics and transportation companies, and government entities. The largest cloud native cluster at Oracle is composed of over 500 nodes.
As the Cloud Native Framework blog points out, culture, code and cloud have fundamentally transformed the landscape for developing, deploying, and running applications. Organizations are faced with delivering modern apps while evolving from traditional software development processes. Containers, serverless, infrastructure as code, and event-driven architectures such as streaming have to be integrated into application lifecycles, often at high cost and effort. EnterCard, a financial services company based in Europe, used Oracle Cloud, including Container Engine for Kubernetes, to achieve significant benefits.
“We wanted to migrate our applications to microservices to improve development lead time and run time performance. We used Oracle Cloud for containerization, API gateways, event-driven architecture, and MySQL to achieve these goals, improve ROI and reduce time to market. A traditional colocation solution would have cost us several times more and much longer to implement,” said, Axel Lefebure, Head of Digital Proposition and Design, EnterCard.
In addition to the complexities of cloud native application development, in some cases there is a lack of performance and scalability, not to mention security, logging, and monitoring capabilities with existing environments.
A leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider has been able to improve agility by adopting tried-and-tested solutions that can help with cloud migrations and hybrid cloud scenarios.
As mentioned previously, open source is a key tenet for cloud native workloads. Oracle has been spearheading the Fn Project, an open source platform that can run functions on any cloud or on-premises environment. Oracle Functions provides a functions-as-a-service platform based on the Fn Project. Customers and partners are using Oracle Functions and the Fn Project for cost-effective and open serverless functions.
“We’re excited to see Oracle continue to embrace open source and cloud native technology like Oracle Functions. The new capability of Oracle Functions provides OCI customers with the ability to break away from the old, expensive methods of consuming their enterprise data. Combining Oracle Functions with the power of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous Database gives us new ways to help our clients unlock even more value from their data,” said, Chris Pasternak, Managing Director, North America Oracle Technology Lead, Accenture.
Oracle Resource Manager for infrastructure-as-code leverages the open source Terraform programming language to enable you to easily deploy stacks of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources. Molecula, a US-based AI startup, leverages Resource Manager with container workloads to automate deployment and updates of infrastructure.
“We’re a cutting-edge startup focused on helping make data AI-ready. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure outperformed all other vendors when we benchmarked on cost/performance basis. Leveraging Kubernetes with Container Engine and Terraform with Resource Manager provided the agility and resiliency to meet our SLAs,” explained, H.O. Maycotte, CEO, Molecula.
