To meet the growing demand for Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) with global organizations, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is introducing new capabilities that can boost the reliability and efficiency of large-scale Kubernetes environments while simplifying operations and reducing costs. By reducing the skills barrier, risk, and management burden on IT, the new capabilities can increase the reliability and efficiency of enterprise-grade Kubernetes while providing compounded cost savings for large Kubernetes environments.

“With Kubernetes as the linchpin of enterprises’ container platforms, we have seen increased customer adoption of Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes and its usage in large-scale environments,” said Vijay Kumar, vice president, product marketing, app dev services & developer relations, Oracle. “The new capabilities will help our enterprise customers simplify the management of their large-scale environments, improve the reliability of their operations, and optimize their resources. With OCI offering the best cloud for optimally scaling Kubernetes via a seamless management experience and unrivaled price-performance, customers will be able to drive their businesses forward while realizing cost savings of up to 50 percent compared to other cloud providers.”

New Enhancements Enable Customers to Focus on Growing Their Businesses

The latest updates to OKE enable customers to accelerate their journey to cloud-native and help them simplify their modernization efforts, innovate faster, and improve developer productivity. By helping customers offload infrastructure management to the cloud service, they are able to realize considerable cost savings across their expanding Kubernetes footprints.

The latest updates include:

• Virtual Nodes: Provide a serverless Kubernetes experience. They enable organizations to run Kubernetes-based applications at scale and help ensure reliable operations without the operational complexities of managing, scaling, upgrading, and troubleshooting the underlying infrastructure. Virtual Nodes further improve resource utilization by providing pod-level elasticity with usage-based pricing, helping customers optimize the cost of running Kubernetes workloads at scale.
• Add-Ons’ Lifecycle Management: Provides organizations with greater flexibility to install and configure their chosen auxiliary operational software or related applications. The service can manage the full lifecycle of this software, from initial set up and deployment through ongoing upgrades, patching, and more. This includes deployment, upgrades, configuration changes rollout, and more. Add-ons include essential software deployed on the cluster such as CoreDNS and kube-proxy, as well as access to a growing portfolio of optional software operators such as Kubernetes dashboard, Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic, and more.
• Workload Identity: Enables organizations to improve their security posture and lower management overhead with pod-level identity and access management controls.

Additional enhancements include increasing the default setting for newly-provisioned clusters to 2,000 worker nodes to more easily support larger clusters out of the box; support for preemptible (“spot”) instances to enable an additional 50 percent discount off on-demand VM pricing (to be available soon); and financially-backed SLAs for uptime and availability for the Kubernetes API server, in addition to the SLA already provided for the worker nodes.

Customers Accelerate their Cloud-Native Journeys

“Standardizing on Kubernetes and other IaC patterns enables us to have consistent operations across our digital portfolio,” said Sebastian Daehne, director, DevOps engineering, GoTo. “We reduced our cloud spend by migrating our video service from another cloud provider to OKE. Flex Shapes enabled us to accommodate the exact resource needs of our app, saving us a significant amount of money.”

“We run billions of voice AI queries on OCI, using a mix of Kubernetes infrastructure with OKE, GPUs, HPC, and modern developer services including streaming, OpenSearch, and more,” said James Hom, chief product officer and co-founder, SoundHound. “We chose OCI as the best cloud to train and deliver our next generation AI application—helping us provide the fastest and most accurate voice experiences to global brands including Mercedes Benz, Toast, VIZIO, Hyundai, and others. With OCI, we have seen a 50-60 percent performance boost compared to our previous cloud, along with 2x cost reduction—all while doubling our usage.”

“With Oracle Kubernetes Engine we're able to quickly expand agentless scanning of workloads on OCI, which allows us to focus on delivering value to our OCI customers and fuel our continued rapid growth, rather than spend resources on infrastructure management,” said Oron Noah, director of product management, Wiz. “With this focus, we reported $100M ARR in just 18 months, becoming one of the fastest-growing software companies ever.”

“As we increasingly standardize on Kubernetes for our workloads, operations become more complex,” said Mehdi Salour, senior vice president, global network and development operations, 8x8. “We are looking forward to using OKE Virtual Nodes that will provide us with a ‘serverless’ Kubernetes experience. It should help us offload the Kubernetes infrastructure management to OKE. It will save us time and effort—simplifying Kubernetes operations at scale, along with better scaling economics.”

“Embracing cloud-native enables us to accelerate the growth of our business, but challenges managing our environment prevented us from harnessing the full potential of Kubernetes,” said Shigekazu Ohmoto, senior corporate managing director, Nomura Research Institute (NRI). “With the new features in Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, we’ll be able to simplify our operations and scale our applications without needing to add complex configurations or additional nodes. The greater level of choice and control provided by the new enhancements will help us focus on building new applications while reducing complexity and costs.”

Join us at Oracle DevLive Level Up, a free developer event taking place at Oracle’s Redwood Shores campus and online from March 20-23 to hear more about the latest OCI and OKE updates. Register here.

Additional Resources

• Read the blog to learn more about the new capabilities
• Learn more about Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes
• Learn more about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
• Sign up for the Oracle Cloud Free Tier