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A New Cloud Has Appeared on the Horizon: Oracle Public Cloud

Posted by Abel Avram on Oct 06, 2011

Sections: Operations & Infrastructure
Topics: WebLogic ,; Application Servers ,; Java ,; Operations ,; Languages ,; Oracle ,; PaaS ,; Cloud Computing ,; Database ,; Infrastructure ,; Programming ,; Companies

Oracle Public Cloud offers two solutions: SaaS, including Fusion CRM, Fusion HCM, and Social Network, and PaaS, including Java and Database services.

A year ago, Oracle announced Exalogic Elastic Cloud, an appliance for building a private cloud running Java and non-Java applications inside Oracle Linux or Solaris 11 on top of Oracle VM. Larry Ellison, CEO, announced during his keynote at OpenWorld 2011 a new cloud offering: Oracle Public Cloud, “a suite of Oracle applications, middleware and database offerings delivered in a self-service, subscription-based, elastically scalable, reliable, highly available, and secure manner.” Oracle provides hosting, management and software updates similarly to what other clouds do.

Oracle Cloud is powered by Exadata - an appliance similar to Exalogic but running Database 11g - and Exalogic having two core software components: WebLogic and Database 11g. The stack used by Oracle Cloud is depicted in the following graphic:

Oracle Public Cloud offers 2 types of services:

Application Services (SaaS), offering the possibility to run the following suites of applications in the cloud: Oracle Fusion CRM, Oracle Fusion HCM, Oracle Social Network. These services are targeted to end users interested in running Oracle and related 3rd party apps in the cloud rather then on their own servers.
Platform Services (PaaS),
- Java: WebLogic Server 11g with support for JDeveloper, Eclipse and NetBeans. Services can be monitored via a RESTful interface. Supports Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF), and 3rd party frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, EclipseLink.
- APEX: Database 11g accessible directly from cloud services via Oracle Application Express (APEX), from a Java Cloud via JDBC or remotely via a RESTful interface. Supports SQL and PL/SQL. The architecture of this service is shown below.

Currently, only Fusion CRM and HCM are available, Oracle promising that the other services will be available soon. These services are available globally but Oracle has datacenters only in USA, planning to build such centers on other continents (EMEA and APAC) if there is enough customer request.

Oracle assures companies that they won’t try to lock them into their cloud, customers having the option to move their applications to other clouds or on premises at any time.

One different aspect from other offerings is that customers will pay a monthly fee rather than pay per CPU usage or hour. But there is no license needed for using Oracle applications, any product license being included in the fee. These fees are undisclosed so far.

Oracle Cloud services offer triple mirrored storage and offsite tape backup. Also, they support single sign-on and are secured with WS-Security 1.0 and 1.1, and applications are scanned for viruses before running in the cloud.