Oracle Announces General Availability of Functions as a Service and Events
What Is Cloud Native?
Cloud native technologies are characterized by the use of containers, microservices, serverless functions, development pipelines, and infrastructure expressed as code. Cloud native enables faster software development and the ability to build applications that are resilient, manageable, observable, and dynamically scalable to global enterprise levels.
Oracle is a Platinum member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which oversees several projects. The CNCF states that "cloud native technologies enable software developers to build great products faster." Consider the following examples:
- Using containers provides better environment consistency, faster deployment, portability, and scalability
- Using microservices enables different teams to build and test different parts of an application simultaneously, speeding up software development
- Using continuous integration allows developers to quickly iterate on software builds
- Using infrastructure as code reduces the time taken to deploy servers, storage, and networking, thereby increasing efficiency
Oracle Cloud Native Services
Container Engine for Kubernetes
General availability
This developer-friendly and enterprise-ready managed service runs highly available Kubernetes clusters with the control, security, and performance of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, while keeping pace and compatibility with the CNCF ecosystem.
Cloud Infrastructure Registry
General availability
A highly available container registry service that enables users to store and share their container images with ease. The registry allows users to push and pull images with the Docker CLI or pull images directly into Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes deployments.
Resource Manager
General availability
This managed service can provision all Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources and services. Resource Manager reduces configuration errors and increases productivity by managing infrastructure declaratively (that is, infrastructure as code) using industry-standard Terraform.
Streaming
General availability
This highly available, scalable, and multitenant streaming platform makes it easy to collect and manage streaming data. Streaming enables applications such as IoT, security, and supply chain, where large amounts of data are collected from many sources and need to be processed in real time.
Monitoring
General availability
This integrated service reports metrics from all resources and services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Use predefined metrics and dashboards or use the service API to obtain a holistic view of the health, performance, and capacity of the system. The monitoring service includes alarms to track these metrics and take action when they vary or exceed defined thresholds. Alarms provide a critical service to help users meet service-level objectives and avoid interruptions.
Notifications
General availability
This scalable service broadcasts messages to distributed components such as email and PagerDuty. With Notifications, users can easily deliver messages about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to large numbers of subscribers through a publish-subscribe pattern.
Functions
General availability
Scalable, multitenant serverless functions let users focus on writing code to meet business needs without having to know about any infrastructure concepts. Users pay only for the compute time used and pay nothing when the code is not running.
Events
General availability
This offering enables users to react to changes in the state of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources, both when initiated by the system or by user action. Events can store information to object storage, or they can trigger Oracle functions to take actions, Notifications to inform users, or Streaming to update external services.
Cloud Native Challenges and Oracle’s Value
Cloud Native Challenges
Cloud native technologies require developers, DevOps professionals, and software architects to adopt a new set of frameworks, which can present challenges.
- Do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches lack enterprise-grade reliability, security, scaling, and manageability. As a result, your organization may be more susceptible to infrastructure outages, software downtime, security breaches, capacity constraints, and issues related to monitoring and observability.
- Fragmented tools are complicated to integrate together and expensive to maintain. It may be inefficient and costly to use homegrown scripts and utilities to deploy and update software for container orchestration, serverless and other cloud native technologies.
- Proprietary solutions lock your organization in to a vendor who uses custom APIs and nonstandard software stacks. You may be limited in your choice of languages, databases, hardware, clouds, and on-premises infrastructure.
Oracle’s Value for Cloud Native
Oracle Cloud Native Services run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and help you:
- Take advantage of managed services, such as Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Registry, that are frequently updated and patched.
- Easily deploy, monitor, and scale cloud native applications using tools such as Resource Manager, Monitoring, and Notificiations.
- Leverage industry-leading infrastructure for performance, security, and availability, allowing you to focus more time on higher-value tasks.
- Use unmodified open source software and interoperable technologies to reduce lock-in and increase portability.
- Leverage hybrid cloud and multicloud architectures using Oracle Cloud Native Framework. In addition to Oracle Cloud Native Services, Oracle Cloud Native Framework includes Oracle Linux Cloud Native Environment, software based on open, community-driven CNCF projects for on-premises and third-party cloud environments.