Oracle today announced new application development capabilities to enable developers to rapidly build and deploy applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Designed for cloud native and Java developers, the new capabilities will help developers build highly responsive and efficient cloud native applications while reducing costs. In addition, Oracle is building generative AI capabilities for application development to take advantage of cutting-edge large language models with the level of security and privacy that enterprises demand.

“Today we are announcing several new capabilities across our cloud native and Java portfolios that will enable developers to simplify and accelerate the development, deployment, and management of applications while reducing costs,” said Mahesh Thiagarajan, executive vice president, Security and Developer Platforms, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “In addition, with our upcoming new generative AI services, Oracle will help developers further leverage the latest technologies to help drive business growth.”

Oracle is introducing several new capabilities for Java developers:

• Java 21: Helps developers increase productivity and drive innovation and growth across their organizations. Announced today, Java 21 (Oracle JDK 21) is the latest version of the world’s number one programming language and development platform. By delivering thousands of improvements on performance, stability, and security, including 15 Java Development Kit (JDK) Enhancement Proposals, Java 21 helps developers cost-effectively accelerate the development of robust, scalable, and secure applications.
• GraalOS: Helps developers improve the responsiveness of applications while lowering costs. GraalOS is a technology that works with advanced GraalVM Native Image to enable deployed applications to run as native machine executables to take full advantage of the latest Arm and Intel features. It enables low latency and fast start capability that increases the responsiveness of applications, while its reduced memory requirements and ability to suspend and resume applications improve efficiency.
• OCI Functions powered by GraalOS: Helps developers increase application performance, improve productivity, and reduce costs. OCI Functions powered by GraalOS is a service that addresses the issue of slow cold starts by running functions as native executables, providing sub-second startup times. In addition, OCI Functions leverages GraalVM Native Image to dramatically reduce memory usage by up to 50 percent, and out-of-the-box integrations to improve developer productivity. For developers that run functions at scale, the increase in CPU performance, reduced memory usage, and faster startup can result in significant cost savings and increased performance.
• Graal Cloud Native 4.0: Helps developers reduce compute costs by enabling them to build portable cloud-native Java microservices that start almost instantly and use fewer resources. Graal Cloud Native 4.0 is a curated set of open-source Micronaut framework modules to help developers take full advantage of powerful cloud services without dependency on proprietary platform APIs.

Oracle is also introducing new capabilities to help developers simplify cloud native deployments, Kubernetes operations, and enhanced security while saving costs:

• Oracle Cloud Guard Container Governance: Enables developers to enhance security for Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) via predefined policies aligned to Kubernetes Security Posture Management. In addition, the new Oracle Cloud Guard Container Governance service simplifies configuration of containerized workloads deployed on OKE, helping developers save time and costs associated with audits and reviews.
• Arm Support for all Runtimes: Helps developers leverage lower-cost CPUs for all runtimes, including OCI Functions, OKE Virtual Nodes, and OCI Container Instances in addition to bare metal compute, virtual machines, and OKE Managed Nodes. Since Arm processors are highly compact and energy efficient, developers can help their organizations realize cost savings by running suitable workloads on Arm.

The above innovations are in addition to recent significant releases that make Kubernetes operations simpler and more secure:

• Serverless Kubernetes: Enables customers to ensure reliable operations at-scale without the complexities of managing, scaling, upgrading, and troubleshooting the underlying Kubernetes node infrastructure.
• Add-on lifecycle management: Provides customers greater flexibility to install and configure their chosen operational software or related applications. Add-ons include essential Kubernetes software deployed on the cluster, such as CoreDNS and kube-proxy, and access to a growing portfolio of related applications, such as the Kubernetes Dashboard, Oracle Database Operator, and more.
• Workload identity: Enhances security posture with the ability to specify granular identity and access management controls at the pod level versus scoping access permissions at the node level.
• Pre-built functions: Ready-to-use tasks or actions implemented using OCI Functions. Pre-built functions leverage the existing integration between various OCI services to help orchestrate service functionality using a guided experience, enabling you to configure functions without having to build or manage code.

“With Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, 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.

In addition, Oracle is building generative AI capabilities for application development that are powered by NVIDIA GPUs. The capabilities will be designed to help ensure security and privacy while delivering predictable performance. Developers will gain access to the foundational models that enables them to tune and customize in a secure manner, hosting the models in Oracle’s AI infrastructure—all the way up to OCI Supercluster scale—and exposing them via endpoints. Developers will then be able to leverage these tuned and customized models to embed generative AI in their own applications. Developers will also have access to out of the box assistance for developer use cases such as test generation, code translation, code generation, code refactoring, and code summarization.

“At Cohere, we are building generative AI models that will act as an extension of the developer, allowing them to maintain their unique coding styles while helping them develop more efficient code,” said Saurabh Baji, senior vice president, engineering, Cohere. “We are very excited to work with OCI to build foundational models that address a wide range of developer use-cases.”

Java 21, Arm support for all runtimes, and Graal Cloud Native 4.0 are available now. OCI Functions Powered by GraalOS and Oracle Cloud Guard Container Governance will be available soon.

Additional Resources

• Learn more about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 
• Learn more about OCI Application Development
• Learn more about Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes
• Learn more about GraalVM
• Download Oracle JDK 21