Oracle Unveils Unified Container Deployment and Management Platform

Oracle today unveiled a container deployment and management platform for both Kubernetes-based cloud-native applications and legacy Java applications designed for the WebLogic Server platform that have been containerized.

David Cabelus, senior principal product manager for Oracle, said the Oracle Verrazzano Enterprise Container Platform makes it simpler for organizations to unify application life cycle management across both emerging and legacy applications.

Designed to be deployed on any cloud or on-premises IT environment, the Oracle Verrazzano Enterprise Container Platform builds on an existing Oracle WebLogic Kubernetes Toolkit that enables IT teams to convert monolithic applications running on a Java application server into a set of container images.

Oracle Verrazzano extends that capability by adding a cloud-neutral approach to automate the deployment and management of those images alongside microservices built using containers that were always intended to be deployed on a Kubernetes cluster. All the appropriate Kubernetes Operators are automatically surfaced to not only create Kubernetes objects but also model applications in a way that takes advantage of the Oracle Coherence in-memory data grid and the Helidon framework for deploying Java libraries.

The Oracle Verrazzano platform is based on the Open Application Model specification. Whenever an application is deployed, the platform automatically distributes Kubernetes custom resources for the application to the cluster where the application will be deployed, creates namespaces for the application and copies secrets to the namespace.

It also employs the open source Istio service mesh to creates network policies, along with ingress into the service mesh itself. The Oracle Verrazzano platform also provides built-in observability tools based on open source Prometheus monitoring tools and Grafana dashboards to collect logs and capture metrics for all workloads using a set of pre-configured dashboards in addition to providing visibility into the underlying Kubernetes cluster.

Finally, Oracle has also included the security controls needed to protect network traffic, system components and application components across a distributed Oracle Verrazzano environment.

Oracle

Cabelus says Oracle Verrazzano will advance the company’s overall approach to hybrid cloud computing by providing the means to unify application life cycle management across a diverse portfolio of applications. That approach reduces the total cost of IT by eliminating the need to acquire, deploy and maintain separate management platforms for each class of application deployed.

Oracle Verrazzano is clearly designed to appeal most to enterprise IT organizations that have made extensive investments in deploying monolithic Java applications on top of Oracle WebLogic application servers. In a cloud-native environment, many of the tasks once handled by an application server are now managed via the orchestration engine that is at the heart of Kubernetes clusters.

It’s not clear how many monolithic applications will be modernized to run as a set of microservices that can more easily scale up and down as required. However, with the release of Oracle Verrazzano, that conversion process is not only becoming easier to achieve but also to manage on an ongoing basis. The challenge now is determining which legacy applications provide enough business value to make converting them into a set of microservices worth the effort.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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