Oracle is doubling down on cloud services and products. The company revealed at Oracle OpenWorld this morning a host of new cloud-based services ranging from container hosting on bare metal servers, to API management, to an on-premise box that bridges the gap between cloud and data center.
Siddhartha Agarwal, vice president of product management and strategy for Oracle Cloud Platform, said that this is all in furtherance of bringing more developers to its platform. “Oracle is moving toward supporting developers, not just in the context of Oracle technologies, but also for non-Oracle technologies.”
(Related: Java EE moves forward once more)
One of the top priorities for Oracle was supporting multiple languages, not just Java. ”Most developers want to be able to develop in Java SE, Node,js, PHP, Ruby, Python and others,” said Agarwal. “We’ve actually delivered a container-based environment where users are able to deploy Java applications, PHP and Node-based applications. They can just write the code, we’ll provide the scalability up and down.”
As of today, Node, Java and PHP are supported in the Oracle Cloud Platform and the Oracle Public Cloud, with other language support coming within the next few months; Python and Ruby should be the next to arrive. “The Oracle public cloud is for all developers, not just Java EE or Oracle-specific developers,” said Agarwal.
Oracle’s new cloud services already include Oracle databases as a service, but today the company added MySQL Enterprise Edition to the offerings. The Cassandra and MongoDB NoSQL data stores have also been added to the service, and can be provisioned quickly with the click of a checkbox.
The Oracle Cloud Platform is the portion of the company’s cloud service that hosts IaaS and PaaS, while the Oracle Public Cloud is where SaaS offerings are hosted, said Agarwal. This distinction is important because it divides the capabilities available in the two cloud products Oracle is pushing at OpenWorld.
On the Oracle Cloud Platform side, IaaS means Oracle is offering not just virtual machine hosting, but also bare-metal provisioning of servers. This has been coupled with support for containers within Oracle’s clouds. “They can bring their Docker containers as is, or they can bring their code and run it in the container-based cloud service, which is running Java SE, PHP, Node.js or whatever you want,” said Agarwal. This will help enable developers to deploy microservices, he added.
“One of the most important things when managing microservices,” said Agarwal, “is you want to expose business logic as APIs. You need a platform to manage APIs. On our platform-as-a-service, you can expose a portal for other developers so they can consume those APIs. You have validation, authentication and versioning in the platform. You can make sure those APIs can be accessed only by those authorized to access them. And you have the ability to build mobile applications.”
“We’re giving you a very rich platform and a mobile front end,” said Agarwal. “You can use C#, Ionic or Xamarin. You can build using any front-end framework you want. The main value we’re providing is on the back end. You can get insight into how your data is being used.”
Agarwal said that the API-management tools inside the Oracle Cloud Platform will enable developers to easily troubleshoot problems, revise APIs, and keep them highly available. He added that Oracle has “created complete Continuous Delivery capability. You can use Git for source control, Maven for integrations, Chef for scripting. We have code reviews, and everything within the context of the Oracle PaaS platform. We know people have built their own Continuous Deployment tools, and you can insert them into this CD harness. We’ve created web hooks for people to be able to easily do it. They can use any IDE they want.”
Agarwal said that Oracle has come up with a solution for enterprise workloads that cannot be run off premise. The company is now renting the Oracle Public Cloud Machine, which can be placed on site in a data center, and can be configured to run on-premise workloads while also pushing acceptable loads out to the Oracle Public Cloud.
Finally, Oracle has launched a new developer site. In addition to its Oracle-focused Oracle Technology Network, the company now has developers.oracle.com, dedicated to spreading information on not just Oracle’s technologies, but development technologies in general. Oracle will be launching a 20-city tour to spread the word on this new developer site.
