Oracle unveils Container Native Application Development Platform
Seeking to embrace the modern developer building applications for the cloud, Oracle on Monday is announcing early adopter availability of the Oracle Container Native Application Development Platform.
Three new services comprise the platform: Oracle Container Engine, a managed Kubernetes service to create and manage Kubernetes clusters; Oracle Container Registry Service, a private container registry service for storing and sharing container images across multiple deployments; and Oracle Container Pipelines, a full container lifecycle management service. The services can be consumed together or separately.
Unveiled at the annual OpenWorld conference, the platform takes advantage of the extensive cloud infrastructure that Oracle introduced at last year's conference.
"Containers and container native applications are one of the killer apps to use on top of bare metal," Bob Quillin, VP of the Oracle Container Group, said to ZDNet.
The platform also plays directly into Oracle's development of platform-as-a-service offerings and its application initiative, Quillin said, giving developers a "frictionless experience."
The new platform provides an open, standards-based approach using Kubernetes 1.7. The registry service is using a Docker V2-compliant API.
"The are all things customers use internally," Quillin said. "When they're on the cloud, they want to have a similar, mirrored stack they can plug into, that is consistent with their corporate standards. That's really want's driven us, and more broadly, the whole community... there's a stack that's becoming a standard. People are pushing their vendors,saying, 'This is a stack we want to see you use because this is a stack we use internally."
Oracle on Monday is also open sourcing a serverless developer project called Fn, which will bring serverless capabilities to its Oracle Application Development platform.
"Our goal to work with community" on the open source project, Quillin said. "Serverless is one area where there hasn't been a lot of standardization... Most of the work is just beginning in the open source community of how do we put together a serverless architecture that's similar to the benefits you get from the open source container movement and the open source Kubernetes movement."
Fn is relatively far along as far as open source serverless projects go, Quillin said. "People can start running functions themselves, and over time Oracle will be offering a service based upon it," he said.
Currently, Fn can run on a laptop, a private data center or any cloud. It's also container native, so serverless functions can run inside a container and can be managed just as any other container would be. There are capabilities tailored for developers like Fn.flow, which lets a developer orchestrate and sequence functions together right within their language.It uses a variety of different application development languages including Go, Java, Ruby and Python.