At its OpenWorld 2017 conference today, Oracle charted a course forward that essentially creates a managed DevOps platform spanning a broad number of application types and styles.
The Oracle Application Development Platform is a subset of the Oracle Cloud Platform optimized for application development. Siddhartha Agarwal, vice president of product management and strategy, says the company is working to automate every aspect of DevOps with an eye toward making it possible for organizations to concentrate all their efforts on developing applications versus managing them.
The latest step in achieving that goal are updates to the Oracle Application Development Platform, which now incorporates the Oracle Container Native Application Development Platform based on the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration engine, and Oracle Container Engines, a container pipeline management service based on the Wercker software the company acquired earlier this year. The company also announced it is adding support for the Go and Java Enterprise Edition programming languages to existing support for Java Standard Edition, Node.js, PHP Ruby and Python runtimes.
Other options being added to the Oracle Application Development Platform include Fn.a, an open source serverless computing project based on software the company gained when it acquired Iron.io, as well as an implementation of the Open Service Broker that enables applications developed for the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment to be deployed on Oracle Cloud. The company is also making available an instance of a BOSH Cloud Provider Interface to automate the deployment of those Cloud Foundry workloads.
Meanwhile, the Oracle Data Hub Cloud Service now also supports the open-source Cassandra database alongside existing support for MongoDB, Postgres and other databases to be added in the future. However, the core Oracle database remains the primary data engine service. In fact, Oracle Database 18c, announced earlier in the week, employs machine learning algorithms to manage instances of the company’s relational database autonomously with no human intervention required.
Finally, the company is adding a Blockchain Cloud Service that allows developers to access an implementation of open-source Hyperledger blockchain software, as well as an intelligent chatbot platform that can incorporate in mobile computing applications.
Agarwal says his company is committed to making available both commercial and open-source platforms available via an Oracle Cloud Platform that provides access to x86, Sparc and graphical processing units (GPUs). Agarwal says the company expects IT organizations to mix and match back-end services as they see fit. But increasingly all those back-end services will be managed under the auspices of a fully managed continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform.
Long-term, Agarwal says there may even come a day when application workloads are able to self-describe themselves, which would then enable the company to deploy them automatically on the best-suited back end.
Naturally, it may be a while before the level of DevOps nirvana gets achieved. But as machine learning algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) advance, it’s clear that the weight IT organizations are expected to carry is increasingly shifting more toward building applications than managing the underlying infrastructure on which they run.