With scalable compute resources on dedicated space, including $12 per trabyte/year archiving, Docker support and identity management, Oracle’s public cloud is extending its service offering to IaaS. On the PaaS side, database management has been strengthened and development tools have clearly extended their possibilities with the inclusion of JavaScript, Node.js and Python and API management.
Live from San Francisco – Oracle has added a series of IaaS and PaaS services to its public cloud over the past few months, and just announced more at OpenWorld 2015 (October 25-29 in San Francisco). Thomas Kurian, Oracle’s President and Head of Product Development, reviewed them on Tuesday, with some services already open and featured on Cloud.oracle.com, while others will arrive in the coming weeks. . For the Infrastructures part, the new features cover storage, with archiving services supplementing the object storage already available for a year, and compute, with the reinforcement of scalable capacities (elastic compute) under Linux and Windows, as well as support from Docker. “We have added four storage possibilities, the first allowing to archive 1 TB of data for $12 per year”, indicated Thomas Kurian. A company can also perform a complete backup of a database to the cloud with its usual tools. On object storage, adding a NAS cloud gateway allows on-premises applications to see objects on the cloud as standard NFS files (NFS v4). Finally, a large file transfer service is also offered: “We send you a server, you save your files there and send it back to us so that we put them on the cloud for you”, described the president of Oracle.
Scalable compute services on dedicated spaces
On the exploitation of virtual machines (based on Intel Xeon processors), the Oracle cloud now offers two modes to benefit from scalable resources. In addition to deployments in shared spaces, companies wishing to be isolated from other customers can purchase dedicated processing resources with scalable single-tenant server racks. In addition, the Exadata integrated systems, optimized for the exploitation of Oracle databases, and the Big Data appliance are now available as a service billed on a subscription basis. During a demonstration, Thomas Kurian showed how to provision them and start a database. “We also have Docker support with a service to create on-premise images and publish them to a Docker registry using Oracle’s registry or your usual Docker registry,” said the development manager. “You can then launch containers in your compute environment using Mesos or Kubernetes and you benefit from workload portability between your on-premises environments and our cloud or to and from other clouds.” On the network services linking the company’s IS to Oracle’s public cloud, it is now possible to go through Equinix Exchange or to connect directly to it through an MPLS network.
Mobile development tools for different profiles
On the PaaS side, eight services were added this year. On the data management part, customers can install the Oracle database, both on the compute space and on the Exadata service, now benefiting from the Real Application Cluster (RAC), Data Guard and in- memory. A basic NoSQL service is also provided. Everything can be managed from an instance of the Enterprise Manager administration software installed in the cloud or on site. “Customers who already use Enterprise Manager internally can use it to manage their databases in the cloud,” confirmed Thomas Kurian. Oracle also provides an identity and privilege management service to access all three layers of its public cloud (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) that can be integrated with on-premises systems.
Regarding the development of applications, Oracle is aimed in a distinct way at different categories of users. For professional developers who want to migrate workloads to the cloud, it provides several types of services (DataPump, RMAN Backup, cloning via Enterprise Manager, etc.) including GoldenGate Replication, which allows transactions to be replicated to the cloud without having to close the on-premises database to create a cloud instance. GoldenGate manages low-latency movements of large volumes of data in data warehouse cloud services and data lakes. It simplifies integration between on-premises databases and DBaaS, Hadoop, Spark and NoSQL services.
The number of languages that can be used has also expanded. Last year, Oracle offered Java EE. Now, you can use Java SE, JavaScript, Node.js, Ruby, Python and PHP. “And we are addressing two other communities that develop applications, in particular intended to work natively on mobiles”. It is possible to expose Rest APIs by publishing them to a catalog and then consuming them from a cloud service on different devices (smartphones and tablets) on iOS, Android or Windows. Finally, for business users, who are not seasoned developers but still need to create applications, Oracle offers a drag&drop assembly service using JavaScript.
30 million daily active users in September
The PaaS also hosts data integration and analysis services with three services addressing radically different user profiles: data scientists, with three services for exploiting big data via Hadoop (announced on last year), business analysts, with ETL services and BI functions, and even non-specialist users who can access self-service visualization tools with “a credit card, a web browser and an Excel spreadsheet”, summed up Thomas Kurian. In his opening keynote, Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison demonstrated the brand new data visualization solution.
During a question and answer session, Thomas Kurian recalled that Oracle operated 19 data centers around the world, including 6 in North America, 3 in the United Kingdom, four in continental Europe (including two in Germany), the others being located in Sydney, Singapore and Japan. “We manage a thousand petabytes of storage,” he said to help assess the volumes supported. “During the month of September, there were 34 billion transactions per day in our cloud, more than 35,000 tenants and more than 30 million active users per day”.
Other topics discussed at OpenWorld 2015: Security in the cloud, The Sparc M7 chip protects the database
