Oracle Delivers Major Innovations to Oracle Cloud Platform’s Application Development Portfolio

Oracle announced major advancements to the Oracle Application Development Platform, making it even more open, modern and easy to use. Part of Oracle Cloud Platform, the new offering provides an open, standards-based approach to enabling developers to build, deploy and manage modern applications using a wide variety of tools, programming languages, infrastructures and databases.

The announcement includes new products and features such as Oracle Container Native Application Development Platform, Oracle Data Hub Cloud Service, Blockchain Cloud Service, server-less capabilities, expanded polyglot support, and an intelligent chatbot platform.

New Development Capabilities and Open Source Options

Enabling customers to avoid cloud lock-in, Oracle announced early adopter availability of the Oracle Container Native Application Development Platform to simplify building, deploying and operating container-based applications in the cloud. The platform includes Oracle Container Engine, a managed Kubernetes service to create and manage Kubernetes clusters for secure, high performance and high availability container deployment.

It also delivers 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 life-cycle management service based on the Wercker acquisition, for continuous integration and delivery of micro service applications. The free community edition of Wercker and early adopter access to the Oracle Container Native Application Development Platform are available at http://www.wercker.com/.

“As enterprises worldwide further advance on their journey to the cloud, they are increasingly worried of being locked-in by their cloud vendors. In tandem, existing cloud solutions consist mainly of un-integrated, discrete and proprietary components,” said Mark Cavage, vice president of software development at Oracle. “With the Oracle Container Native Application Development Platform, Oracle plans to provide a modern, cloud-neutral and community-driven container-native technology stack, with Kubernetes driving orchestration and management for running new applications on Oracle’s cloud or others.”

The Oracle Container Native Application Development Platform is another step in delivering an open, modern and easy way for developers to build container-based applications. It also lets developers run in true hybrid cloud mode, using the same stack they run on-premises in any cloud.

Oracle is also planning to bring serverless capabilities to its Oracle Application Development Platform based on Fn, a serverless developer project that Oracle open-sourced. Developers using Oracle Cloud Platform can now build and run applications by just writing code, without provisioning, scaling or managing servers, allowing them to focus on delivering value and new services. Fn is open source-based and able to run across multiple clouds, further reducing risk of vendor lock-in.

Developers using Cloud Foundry can now build directly on the Cloud Foundry platform on Oracle Cloud. Oracle has released as generally available an Open Service Broker implementation that supports integration of Oracle Cloud Platform Services into Cloud Foundry workloads. Additionally, Oracle has open sourced the BOSH Cloud Provider Interface, which enables workloads from software like Cloud Foundry to be deployed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and is targeting general availability for later this year.

The release of the Oracle Data Hub Cloud Service allows developers to initialize and run Cassandra clusters on-demand without having to manage backups, patching and scaling for Cassandra clusters. Oracle Data Hub is a foundation for other databases like MongoDB, Postgres and more coming in the future.

New Innovations and Services

With announcement of the Oracle Blockchain Cloud Service, developers get a highly advanced, enterprise-grade distributed ledger cloud platform that empowers them to accelerate and create new revenue streams, reduce cost as well as risk and securely extend on-premise ERP and SaaS applications to drive tamper-proof B2B transactions.

Oracle also delivered an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot platform, which simplifies enterprise development and deployment of AI-powered bots. Part of Oracle Mobile Cloud, the intelligent chatbot platform enables enterprises to better engage with customers and employees across popular messaging platforms.

Complementing this, for developers seeking flexibility to build cloud native applications with Go and Java Enterprise Edition, Oracle updated its Application Container Cloud Service to include choice of two new application runtimes—Go and Java Enterprise Edition—adding to the existing Java Standard Edition, Node.js, PHP Ruby and Python programming runtimes.

Oracle is also providing support for running Java EE applications in the cloud-native platform backed by Oracle Weblogic Server, the industry’s #1 Java EE app server. Capabilities to run mission critical Java EE applications are now enhanced with automated disaster recovery capabilities across compute regions and stretched clusters across availability domains.

“With the latest Oracle Cloud Platform enhancements, we continue to offer our customers unparalleled choice and raise the bar for them to drive new innovations, embrace digital transformation and out-perform the competition”, said Amit Zavery, senior vice president, product development, Oracle Cloud Platform. “These additions reflect Oracle’s focus on delivering a cutting-edge application development experience leveraging the latest and most game-changing technologies.”

The announcement followed recent news of Oracle’s continued commitment to open-source standards including joining the Container Native Computing Foundation, dedicating engineering resources to the Kubernetes project, open-sourcing several container utilities and making its flagship databases and developer tools available in the Docker Store marketplace.