OCI Expands App Development Portfolio with New Serverless Container and Messaging Services and Capabilities to Simplify Enterprise Adoption of Cloud Native Technologies
October 18, 2022 | 6 minute readToday, we are expanding the comprehensive portfolio of over a hundred services that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers to help developers build, run, modernize, and extend applications. These include a wide range of developer services for building cloud native apps, pretrained AI, data services, and low-code development, as well as solutions to improve security, observability, developer experience, and more – including the new services and capabilities we are introducing today.
New services and capabilities dramatically simplify customers’ path to cloud native
The new services and capabilities are designed to accelerate the adoption of cloud native technologies by developers and enterprises alike. They provide a serverless experience that simplifies the development and operations for some of the critical capabilities that have become the backbone for designing modern applications: container runtime options, queue messaging for modern service communications, and workflow orchestration for composable, re-usable automation flows and application logic.
By eliminating the operational burden and learning curve required to manage complex cloud native technologies across distributed architectures at scale, the serverless solutions help improve developer speed and productivity.
Here are the details on the new services and capabilities:
Accelerating the adoption of containers and Kubernetes with new serverless container runtime options
A new Virtual Nodes capability for Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) and Container Instances service provide two new serverless compute options for running container-based apps in the cloud in a fast, secure, and reliable way – without having to manage any servers.
Enterprises across industries are looking to accelerate the adoption of containers and Kubernetes for their modern, cloud native applications. However, the primary challenge teams face is the complexity and management overhead of running enterprise-grade Kubernetes at scale – with many organizations lacking the expert staff or advanced expertise to support these apps.
OKE users can now create Kubernetes clusters that use Virtual Nodes for a complete serverless experience. With Virtual Nodes, enterprises can have reliable operations at scale, without having to manage any infrastructure. Virtual Nodes provide granular, pod-level elasticity with per-pod pricing based on consumed resources – while eliminating the operational overhead of managing, scaling, upgrading, and troubleshooting worker nodes’ infrastructure.
The new capability is in addition to the Managed Nodes option already available in OKE. With Managed Nodes, customers have more control over the node configuration, while sharing the operational responsibility for worker nodes’ infrastructure.
For customers wanting to run containers in the cloud for use cases that don’t require orchestration (like Kubernetes), OCI now offers Container Instances. Users can launch containers in seconds with a single CLI command or a guided Console experience, specifying their preferred Compute shape, resource allocation, and other optional parameters. They can even allocate all the CPU/memory available for a compute shape to a single container instance to support demanding apps.
Container Instances run on an optimized, dedicated environment with strong isolation for improved security. Customers only pay for the CPU and memory resources allocated to their instances at the exact same price as regular OCI Compute. There are no additional charges for the seamless serverless experience. With fast spin-up, better security, and reliable operations – and an identical price point as DIY – Container Instances offer the best value for running containers in the cloud.
Enabling fully managed serverless messaging at scale
OCI Queue is a new serverless messaging service that is ideal for distributed, microservices-based architectures. OCI Queue enables asynchronous communications to allow for the decoupling of services, so that they can scale independently and handle spikes in demand. OCI Queue is a fully managed solution with no infrastructure to manage and is elastic to support a high volume of transactional data that requires independent processing without loss or duplication. Using open standards including STOMP and OpenAPI-defined REST endpoints, OCI Queue can easily communicate with any client, minimizing development efforts and enabling extendibility of customers’ application design. OCI Queue is charged per API request and message size, with the first million requests per month offered for free.
Streamlining orchestration with serverless Workflow engine
OCI Workflow is a serverless workflow engine with a graphical flow designer that enables developers and architects to accelerate the creation and processing of application logic, automated IT tasks, and data jobs. This includes rich support for the orchestration of OCI services, such as OCI Functions and AI/ML. OCI workflow pricing will be announced soon.
The new services and the new Virtual Nodes capability for OKE are currently offered in limited availability and become generally available in the coming weeks. To learn more and sign up to be notified once they launch, please visit:
Flexibility and openness are the foundation of the OCI experience
We understand that every development team has unique preferences for their application development tools, and that organizations differ in their processes, stacks, and technology requirements.
That means that choice matters. This is why one of OCI’s key values and design principles has always been to ensure we’re open, flexible, and agnostic towards our customers’ language, tool, and architecture preferences.
OCI is designed to support any open source or third-party tool, technology, framework, or ecosystem solution. We offer a wide range of managed services built on popular open source frameworks, such as our Kubernetes service, Resource Manager with Terraform, Search with OpenSearch, Kafka-compatible streaming, and MySQL database. In addition, customers can easily deploy any third-party technology, such as databases and middleware, or plug in the tools they’re already using – like Argo CD, GitHub, Gitlab, Jira, Jenkins, Datadog, and Splunk – to power their next innovation.
This openness and flexibility mean that teams can come to OCI "as they are" – with their unique skills, knowledge level, toolset, or requirements. Using their preferred mix of OCI native services and other ecosystem technologies, teams can leverage their existing skills to boost productivity as they accelerate their cloud journeys – without having to worry about vendor lock-in or portability issues.
It’s time to build on OCI
With these new services and capabilities, we’ve lowered the barriers to entry and made it easier than ever to get started with OCI to build cloud native applications. If you’re attending Oracle CloudWorld this week, come by our booth and talk to our experts about how we can help you build new apps or modernize and extend your existing ones.
To get started on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, create your free account and explore the architecture center to discover what you can build today!
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Leo Leung
Vice President, Product Marketing, OCI
I'm an experienced product manager and product marketer at both large and startup vendors. I've been an cloud application, platform, and infrastructure end user and website developer, enterprise storage system product manager and marketer, cloud storage and cloud application product manager and operations manager, and storage software product marketer. I've managed business partnerships with many infrastructure ISVs, as well as large systems vendors like Cisco, Dell, EMC, HPE, and IBM.