In a recent blog post, Oracle announced the limited availability of three new service offerings in its Oracle Cloud Native Services platform. The three new services include Kafka Compatibility for Oracle Streaming, an API Gateway for managing connectivity to serverless components and containers and a Logging service that supports log management and analytics across resources and applications.
Oracle Cloud Native Services provide developers with a platform that they can use to build applications using many of the recent development paradigms, including containers, serverless functions, infrastructure as code and APIs.
The recent announcement by Oracle adds new capabilities, in limited availability, to expand its reach for developers looking to build on modern cloud platforms. One of the areas of investment for Oracle is Kafka Compatibility for Oracle Streaming. Oracle Streaming was introduced earlier this year and provides developers with the ability to stream Big Data workloads, like Internet of Things (IoT), through scalable and managed infrastructure.
Kafka Compatibility allows organizations to use a Kafka compliant API to publish and subscribe to streaming messages, while leveraging the underlying infrastructure of Oracle. Somnath Lahiri, product lead at Oracle, explains why adding Kafka Compatibility was important:
Since its inception, the core tenet of Oracle Cloud Native Services has been to embrace open source. Today, we’re proud to announce compatibility with Apache Kafka, the leading message bus platform for building event-driven applications and real-time big data infrastructure for analytics.
Oracle cites some of the benefits of using Kafka Compatibility over other approaches as:
Use the Kafka ecosystem with the Kafka API, eliminating vendor lock-in, leveraging Oracle’s enterprise AuthN and AuthZ security services and spending 20-40% less than self-managed Kafka with pay-as-you-go pricing.
Another area of investment for Oracle is an API Gateway, currently in limited availability. Oracle’s API Gateway is a highly-available service that allows developers to manage and govern HTTP/S interfaces that abstract underlying API implementations made in Oracle Functions, container engines and compute.
One of the core use cases identified by Oracle is exposing Oracle Functions as APIs. Robert Wunderlich, a product strategy director at Oracle, explains:
Applications built on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and distributed applications on other clouds can access your Oracle Functions via RESTful APIs served by API Gateway. Using the gateway, you can provide an OAuth2 authenticated RESTful API for an Oracle Function and include rate-limiting to protect your backends from spikes in volume.
Lastly, Oracle announced a scalable log management and analytics platform which ingests and manages logs generated by your infrastructure resources and applications. Once the logs have been ingested, administrators can search and analyze logs. In addition, near real-time alerts can be generated by using the embedded rules engine.
