One of the biggest challenges for a large Enterprise software company is how you make major architectural improvements to your product while continuing to innovate. It isn’t practical to shut down all development for a long stretch to do a complete rewrite and the company needs to maintain the high-quality product their customers have come to expect.
Recently at Oracle CloudWorld, Oracle unveiled an internal project which is directly addressing this challenge.
Project Spectra is a major initiative to evolve Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite to an OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) based cloud native architecture. Evolve is the key word in that sentence. This is a gradual architectural change which is taking place “behind the scenes” without the customers even directly realizing it. The customers will simply see the benefits as we progress through the process.
Before we dig into the project specifics, let’s explain what we mean by Cloud Native:
- Cloud native apps are designed and built to exploit the scale, elasticity, resiliency, and flexibility the cloud provides
- Cloud native services empower modern application development using technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker, serverless functions, APIs, and Kafka
- These features enable loosely coupled systems that are resilient, manageable, and observable
It is worth mentioning that Oracle is a Platinum member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Oracle has made Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) an awesome place to build new and improved Fusion Application services.
What is OCI?
- Next-generation enterprise-grade cloud designed to run applications faster and more securely…
- The fastest growing network of global data centers, with 40+ cloud regions available and multiple more planned
- More than 100 cloud infrastructure and platform services which can be used
If you are interested in learning more about how OCI and how it powers the existing Fusion Applications architecture, you should read this blog from earlier this month: Better together: How Oracle Cloud Infrastructure powers Fusion Applications. Also, visit the o.com page Why Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are better together.
What does it mean to evolve Fusion Apps and what do Fusion Applications Cloud Native services look like?
Fusion Applications will be creating new functionality and gradually moving existing functionality into independent cloud native (Spectra) services. These services will be built in a containerized fashion using Docker containers running on top of OCI’s managed Kubernetes service (OKE). These independent services can use OCI’s Streaming Service (OSS) to communicate information in a reliable manner between themselves and the existing Fusion Applications (built on the existing WebLogic based technology stack).
The majority of development at Oracle is done in Java so Project Spectra selected Helidon as a foundational piece of the new architecture. Helidon is an awesome cloud-native, open‑source set of Java libraries for writing microservices that run on a fast web core. If you are not familiar with is, I would encourage you to visit that site and learn more.
As mentioned, one of the key aspects of how Project Spectra is architected is that these services are designed to directly integrate with the existing Fusion Applications. Spectra Services will use the exact same edge security, identity and database as the existing stack.
That last point is the most critical. Spectra Services are entirely stateless. All customer information is stored in the same database as the existing stack. This enables us to leverage the incredible power of the Oracle Database and ensure a graceful evolution to the new architecture. Because the data all lives in the same place, this makes it easy to maintain the powerful Fusion Applications features such as easy Production-to-Test data movement that our customers expect.
Ok. That sounds awesome but where does the project codename come from?
Our core principles!
Security
Performance
Elasticity
Customizations
Telemetry
Resiliency
Agility
However, this blog entry is intended to be a relatively quick read. To learn more about how we are achieving those core principles (or if you are just interested in hearing more about this exciting project), you’ll need to watch the replay of the CloudWorld session: