Oracle Cloud DevOps and Cloud Native Applications

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Ever heard of DevOps? Well, if you’ve been in the hip scene of agile development then you might have heard this term. Development Operations is a consolidated platform of tools that are meant to promote communication between developers and IT operations while giving the ability to provide a quick development response in the form of continuous delivery. Those who have adopted the agile methodology have seen the benefits of quick delivery with the ability to adjust to rapidly changing business requirements. Oracle is trying to build on top of that type of methodology and consolidate the tools surrounding it with their Developer Cloud Service.

what-is-devops-34-638The Developer Cloud service was introduced a few years ago and has been functioning mainly as a DevOps platform. This DevOps platform provides source control management, issue tracking, Hudson continuous Integration, code review, and wiki collaboration all within a unified web portal. It also provides integration with native IDE’s such as eclipse and JDeveloper. I don’t want to bore you with all of the details surrounding each of these features, but if you’re already familiar with an agile methodology then you are familiar with the tools that are popularly used to supplement it. This cloud service tightly integrates all of those tools and provides a single view for developers and operations.

Now, what’s been occurring in the last few years to help bolster this service? They have begun to promote cloud native applications and the underlying microservice architecture to further increase the efficiency of their DevOps platform.

“Cloud native” is a relatively new buzzword that has been making headway, meaning it is built for the cloud and hosted in the cloud. As of recently, cloud native applications have been struggling to take off for various reasons. One major reason being that they are using traditional architectures, such as monolithic, that do not correspond well with the cloud. Oracle is trying to bridge this gap with their development cloud services by promoting the use of a microservice architecture. A microservice architecture pattern is a big contrast to that of a monolithic application; instead of building an application that includes all of the components in one deployable application file, microservice architecture is a suite of independently deployed and narrowly focused services. By spreading out the monolithic application into smaller parts, we can then enhance, patch, and scale those parts as needed without affecting the other ones. These independent parts are supposed to be more manageable within the cloud due to their abstract nature and common connection protocols.570495-slide1

Oracle’s development cloud makes it easy for these microservice containers to be deployed and hosted within their cloud straight from their DevOps platform. Oracle’s vision is to make development, deployment, hosting, and monitoring a single stop shop that is closely integrated with the DevOps platform. This is meant to further increase the efficient manner that is DevOps; rapid development, separation of duties, and maintenance-free continuous deployments.

As a reminder and disclaimer…All of this should be taken with a dose of healthy skepticism because it is all fairly new and untried. Just like any other cloud service, Oracle holds all of the cards which means you are subject to their decisions in real-time. However, we feel strongly that this trend is here to stay and should be embraced.

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