We’re thrilled to announce the general availability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Fleet Application Management. The new service simplifies centralized management and patch operations across your entire cloud stack for any software or technology deployed on OCI. The service is currently available in commercial and dedicated realms, with Alloy and government regions coming soon.
Challenges with Enterprise Patching
Day 2 operations across large fleets of cloud resources have been a challenge for enterprises, particularly when it comes to patch and compliance management at scale. Between the operating system and the application tier, organizations need to regularly patch dozens—sometimes hundreds—of different components, including Oracle software or any other third-party technologies, such as Linux, Windows, middleware, databases, load balancers, and more. The frequency of required patches also increases as more vulnerabilities are discovered and both providers and application owners hurry to patch these to improve their security posture and reduce the risk of costly breaches and service interruptions.
When you need to continuously patch an ever-growing inventory of technologies, across ever-growing footprints of cloud resources, with thousands of different applications, configuration variants, and business requirements—all with strict service-level objectives (SLOs), regulation, and compliance requirements—patch operations become extremely painful.
Enter OCI Fleet Application Management. The service improves IT productivity and efficiency with a centralized solution that reduces the complexity, effort, and cost around day 2 patch and other IT operations. Customers can now improve their patch compliance and security posture, reducing risk by helping to ensure that they’re always up to date without having to do the heavy lifting.
How Fleet Application Management works
The service provides automated discovery of the software inventory deployed across your cloud resources and its patch compliance status. It automatically identifies, validates and deploys missing patches. Customers can schedule touchless patching and run other IT automation tasks using prebuilt customizable runbooks or connect their existing automation scripts and IT processes.
Let’s break down some of the key features offered by the new service and share a bit of what’s to come in the next releases!
Fleet Application Management offers the following benefits and features:
Easy management with fleets:
Enterprises can organize their cloud resources across their portfolio in hierarchical groupings based on the type of resource, environment, installed software, business applications, or custom tags. They can then apply changes, patch, report, or manage the entire fleet or a set of fleets with one click.
Enable continuous compliance:
Automatic discovery of the software inventory deployed in your fleets, along with its patch compliance data, audit reports against policy rules, and automatic drift detection help ensure that you’re always running the latest, most secure patch version.
Touchless patch management:
Easily patch specific components, an entire stack, or roll out a patch across thousands of resources. Hardened processes, state management, and validation of the patch are handled automatically. You can schedule touchless patching to run during specific maintenance windows or trigger patching on-demand to remediate compliance issues.
The service enables customers to automatically discover, verify and patch key Oracle technologies, including Oracle Linux, WebLogic, Java, and Exadata Database service. Windows patching is also natively supported and other popular technologies, such as Oracle HTTP and Oracle Clusterware!
Intuitive IT automation with runbooks and scheduler:
The service provides ready-to-go runbooks for automated patching of key Oracle products and other popular technologies. In addition to the Oracle-provided runbooks, custom runbooks provide a library of customizable prebuilt modules for common IT tasks and a powerful GUI. Custom runbooks enable customers to design their own runbooks to orchestrate patch operations or other IT operations to meet their needs.
Customers can connect their existing automation scripts, continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) or external systems involved in their processes. Customers can trigger runbooks based on governance policies, changes to the environment’s state, recurring schedule, or maintenance window.
IT admins and DevOps professionals can easily scope permissions to precreated fleets and standardized runbooks, providing access to other teams to trigger or schedule these operations through the service UI. As a result, line-of-business admins or other distributed applications teams to take an active role in patching their environments, without requiring senior IT expertise or coding experience, all while helping ensure that organizational policies and required processes are met.
Bring your own product:
Customers can define new software products, product stacks, discovery logic, and custom patch runbooks, enabling them to centralize patch compliance operations across their entire portfolio.
What’s next
We have a packed release schedule coming up, with some of the key enhancements already accessible in limited availability. The service also offers customers the ability to curate private catalogs of runbooks, infrastructure provisioning, and workload templates to promote self-serve standardization across the organization, all with automated drift detection and regulatory compliance. Start using the service today through the Oracle Cloud Console. You can also request access to the limited availability version to experience the upcoming capabilities in a sandbox environment.
Use it for free
OCI Fleet Application Management includes a free tier that enables you to manage up to 25 resources—virtual machines (VMs) or databases—per month at no cost. You can perform unlimited operations on these resources, such as running different runbooks, patching various technologies or products deployed on the same VM, and scheduling various IT tasks. Other resources brought under management are charged per-use.
Stop chasing spreadsheets or manual processes, scrambling to fix deployment failures, or losing sleep over your next audit. OCI Fleet Application Management takes the pain out of software patching and compliance management at scale, for both Oracle technologies and any other software in your stack.
Try OCI Fleet Application Management today!
To learn more, see the following resources:
- Oracle Fleet Application Management
- Fleet Application Management documentation
- Try the service for free
- Watch the webinar replay to see the service in action!
OCI Fleet Application Management at Oracle CloudWorld
Enterprise patch management and compliance operations at scale are painful. But they don’t have to be. Our own team at Oracle must keep up with software patches and apply updates across thousands of instances serving both internal systems and the applications we deliver for our customers. We use OCI Fleet Application Management for our own patching needs and managing fleets of massive-scale infrastructure and critical applications.
If you’re attending Oracle CloudWorld this week, attend our talk to learn how we dramatically improved our total cost of ownership with the service (Session LRN1586), or our product showcase demo (Session PRSH3475). Visit us at the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Observability and Management booth at the expo hall to chat about your use case and learn how Fleet Application Management can help.