Oracle Functions Now Generally Available

August 1, 2019 | 3 minute read
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We're pleased to announce the general availability in all commercial regions of Oracle Functions, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s functions-as-a-service (FaaS) platform. Oracle Functions makes it easy to build cloud native applications by letting developers focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure. With Oracle Functions, you simply write, deploy, and call your function. There are no servers to provision, monitor, or upgrade—it’s serverless!

Functions—What Are They Good For?

Functions are ideal for dealing with event-driven or intermittent workloads, as well as workloads with spiky usage patterns. Functions pricing is pay-as-you-go, so there’s no charge for idle time. Why pay for a function that’s doing nothing? Oracle Functions is also autoscaling, so if your functions experience a surge in usage, the platform scales up to handle the load and then scales down when usage declines. This saves you money and eliminates the need to forecast peak demand and manage resource allocation.

“We have an end-to-end Java framework for developing mobile enterprise applications. We created a mobile messaging application in Java, and when the user hits the “send” key, his message is processed and optionally stored in a database. Oracle Functions is a very good fit for our bursty workload. It allows our Java functions to be executed on-demand and we only pay for what we use without worrying about scalability and availability. Furthermore, the integration capabilities with other cloud services make it easy to leverage other functionality.”

Johan Vos
CTO, Gluon
 

Open (for Business)

Oracle Functions is built on the Apache 2.0 licensed Fn Project, which can be used anywhere, from a developer laptop to a cloud compute platform. By building on open source, we give customers the option to operate their own functions service in-house or use the cloud-scale Oracle Functions platform to avoid the costs associated with managing infrastructure. By deploying to Oracle Functions, customers can rest easy knowing that their code is running on a platform that has 24x7 worldwide support. And by running on Oracle Functions, deployed functions will automatically take advantage of new generations of processors and networking technology when they become available.

“We’re excited to see Oracle continue to embrace open source and cloud native technology like Oracle Functions. The new capability of Oracle Functions provides Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers with the ability to break away from the old, expensive methods of consuming their enterprise data. Combining Oracle Functions with the power of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Autonomous Database gives us new ways to help our clients unlock even more value from their data.”

Chris Pasternak
Managing Director, North America Oracle Technology Lead, Accenture
 

Functions for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Although it’s built on open source, Oracle Functions is seamlessly integrated with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. Because of this, you can:

  • Restrict access to a function, and the resources that a function can access, by using Identity and Access Management
  • Interact with services, including Object Storage, Streaming, and Compute, from a function by using the SDK
  • Monitor your functions and access logs by using the Monitoring and Logging services

Oracle Functions makes it easy to build serverless applications that take full advantage of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform.

“With Oracle Functions, polyglot serverless capability has arrived in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, allowing developers to deploy code in their preferred language without hassle. No infrastructure to be designed and configured, no complex deployment hoops to be jumped through. It's all about quickly building and running code. The tight integration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure makes it easy to create Functions that kick-in when specific events have occurred. We used Oracle Functions for periodic, time triggered events, which retrieve the most recent data from various microservices, process the data and write results to Object Storage. The function we created has no dedicated server assigned to it - in fact, we are not even sure where it runs! All we have to care about is what it does, and it does the job well.”

Lucas Jellema
CTO for AMIS
 

Getting Started

You can find Oracle Functions under Developer Services in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console, where you can create, configure, and monitor your function applications. To get up and running with functions, use the Quick Start guide. For full service details, see the Oracle Functions online documentation. And if you haven’t tried Oracle Cloud Infrastructure yet, sign up for a free trial.

Shaun Smith

Shaun Smith leads product management of Oracle Lab's GraalVM.


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