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The term “cloud-native” is increasingly being used by organizations and vendors alike as a new paradigm shift for how applications can run and be deployed in the cloud.
For Bob Quillin, vice president for Oracle Cloud Developer Relations, cloud-native isn’t just about technology; it’s also about people and process. Quillin sold his company StackEngine to Oracle in December 2015 and has been at Oracle ever since, helping to mature the company’s container strategy. In a video interview with eWEEK, Quillin provides insight into how Oracle views the emerging need for multicloud and what cloud-native is all about.
“It’s a blend of the people, the process and the technology all together; it’s very open-source driven and community-based,” he said.
A foundational element of cloud-native is the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), an organization that Oracle joined in 2017 as a Platinum member. The CNCF got started in 2015 with the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration project and is now home to more than 30 cloud-native projects. With Kubernetes, organizations can deploy, manage and schedule different types of container application workloads across distributed environments.
The Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes was launched in 2017, alongside the Oracle Container Registry for container applications. Oracle also leads the open-source Fn project, which is a serverless, functions-as-a-service effort. In December 2018, the Oracle Linux Cloud-Native Environment was announced, providing organizations with a curated set of CNCF projects to enable cloud application deployments.
Kubernetes and the cloud-native approach have also been closely tied to the multicloud trend. Kubernetes is supported by the three major public cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform) as well other cloud providers, including Oracle and IBM. Quillin said that most customers are committing to multiple clouds and none is interested in being locked in.
While Kubernetes is supported by cloud providers, it is also supported and deployed in private cloud and on-premises deployments. Quillin said that most Oracle customers are running on-premises and in the cloud, which is why it’s important to have cloud-native technology that can run in both deployment scenarios.
“It’s a mandate from customers today to be open, community-driven and … multicloud,” he said.
Enterprise Applications
Beyond just using cloud-native technology as an infrastructure base and deployment target, it’s an approach that is also being used by Oracle to help enable its enterprise applications.
Quillin explained that Oracle is using the Kubernetes Operator pattern, which is an approach to connect existing technologies, like Oracle’s WebLogic Java Application Server, to a modern cloud-native deployment model. With the WebLogic Kubernetes Operator, organizations can run WebLogic servers and applications inside a Kubernetes cluster.
“So you manage the Kubernetes cluster and the WebLogic underneath it, as you would any other cloud-native container technology,” he said.
Oracle also has efforts to enable Java and its namesake Oracle database to be part of cloud-native deployment approaches.
“There is a huge expanse of communities that have been underserved by cloud-native; they didn’t really have an on-ramp to get onto the cloud-native freeway,” Quillin said. “Now for things like WebLogic, Java and database, they can now come in and it builds a bigger tent.”
Watch the full video interview with Bob Quillin above.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.