Conquering the Cloud Native Conundrum
Oracle sponsored this post.
Cloud native has never been bigger or better — or so it seems. Conferences like KubeCon + CloudNativeCon are doubling in size every year. New projects are being adopted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) every month. And the how, what and where we develop and deploy has been totally reimagined over the last five years. DevOps has changed how we develop and deploy software. Open source has democratized what platforms we use. The cloud has revolutionized where we develop and run applications.
But then why do so many enterprise development teams feel left behind — facing a variety of cultural change, complexity and training challenges? The answer is the Cloud Native Conundrum that enterprise developers deal with daily and that the cloud native ecosystem badly needs to address.
It’s Not the Technology, Stupid
It might surprise many, but people issues top the surveys as the biggest challenges facing cloud native today. A recent CNCF survey confirmed that the cloud native community is getting better and better at solving our most challenging technical problems with security, monitoring, storage and networking are all trending downward. Unfortunately, “people” issues continue to top the charts. A Gitlab survey further supports these top challenges — including replacing ingrained practices, resistance to change and cross-team communication.
Solution: A Bigger, Better Cloud Native Tent
The cloud native community needs to build a bigger tent — one that is more open and supports a multicloud future, more sustainable — that reduces complexity versus piling more on and more inclusive to all teams — modern and traditional, startups and enterprises alike. Oracle is addressing this challenge by starting with what enterprises already know and working from there, thus building bridges and on-ramps to cloud native from a familiar starting point.
Open source projects and cloud services can actually help enterprise development teams embrace cloud native culture and open source. The new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Service Broker for Kubernetes is an example of Oracle’s commitment to open source and cloud native solutions targeted at helping move enterprise workloads to the cloud.
More examples of Oracle open source solutions that facilitate enterprise cloud migrations include Helidon, GraalVM, Fn Project, MySQL Operator for Kubernetes and the WebLogic Operator for Kubernetes. In addition, the recently launched Oracle Cloud Developer Image, which is based on Oracle Linux and provides a comprehensive out-of-the-box development platform on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, now includes support for Oracle Java SE (includes Java 8, 11 and 12) and GraalVM. To help ensure enterprise developers have what is needed to make their move to the cloud as easy as possible, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers receive full support for all of this software at no additional cost.
Open Source: Enabling Enterprise Developers
More and more open source projects are being directed at moving enterprise workloads to the cloud and cloud native architectures. For example, the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Service Broker enables provisioning and binding of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services with the applications that depend on those services from within the Kubernetes environment. In particular, this gives database teams a faster and more efficient path to cloud native and Kubernetes, to not only move database applications to the cloud but at the same time improve performance, lower cost and modernize their overall application architecture.
Other key open source projects include:
- Helidon: a Kubernetes-friendly, open source Java framework for writing microservices.
- GraalVM Enterprise: a high performance, multilingual virtual machine that delivers high efficiency, better isolation and greater agility for enterprises in cloud and hybrid environments;
- Fn: an open source, container-native, serverless platform that runs anywhere — from on-premise to public, private and hybrid cloud environments. It is also the basis for the OCI Functions serverless cloud service;
- Grafana PlugIn: exposes OCI health, capacity and performance metrics for customers using Grafana for cloud native observability and management;
- WebLogic Operator for Kubernetes: enables existing WebLogic applications to easily integrate into and leverage Kubernetes cluster management;
- OpenJDK: the focal point for that effort. OpenJDK is an open source collaborative effort that is now releasing on a six-month cadence with a range of new features, many of which are targeted at optimizing Java for cloud native deployments.
In addition, open source community engagement is critical to moving existing projects forward for enterprises and cloud. Oracle continues to contribute to a large number of third-party open source projects and are a top contributor to many including Linux.
Sustainable Cloud Services: Managed and Open
Over the last six months, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has launched and updated a wide range of managed cloud native services that enable enterprises to leapfrog complexity and move to useful productivity. These services include:
- Functions: Based on the Fn Project, this is a scalable, multitenant serverless FaaS that lets developers focus on writing code to meet business needs without having to know about any underlying infrastructure concepts;
- Resource Manager: Based on the open source Terraform project, this is a managed “Terraform-as-a-Service” offering that provisions OCI resources and services;
- Streaming: A managed service that ingests and stores continuous, high-volume data streams and processes them in real-time;
- Monitoring: Provides fine-grained, out-of-the-box metrics and dashboards for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources such as compute instances, block volumes and more and also allows users to add their own custom application metrics;
- Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE): a managed Kubernetes service, launched in 2017, that leverages standard upstream Kubernetes and is certified CNCF conformant.
It’s critical to keep improving and extending the cloud native platform — from service mesh to serverless, security to performance. But as an industry, we need to expend an equal effort on helping existing enterprise development teams embrace cloud native culture and open source. The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Service Broker for Kubernetes along with projects like Helidon, GraalVM, Fn Project, MySQL Operator for Kubernetes and the WebLogic Operator for Kubernetes are just a few of the ways we can all help build a bigger tent to battle the growing enterprise issues of cultural change and rising complexity.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is a sponsor of The New Stack.
Feature Image by Pexels.
