Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Simplify Cloud Native, Microservices DevOps with Oracle Container Cloud

"Containers" are becoming the new normal and an indispensable part of cloud native / microservices development. If you are new to the concept of containers, open a new tab and google. Container benefits are out of scope of this article.
With respect to cloud-native development, containers provide DevOps 2 huge benefits;

  • Robust foundation for microservices "style" architecture & scalability
  • Environment parity (Dev-Test-Prod) and seamless hybrid deployment

All things considered, containers are great for "Dev". Are they good for "Ops"?

With even more services to manage, monitor & maintain, containers certainly pose some challenges unless you have a robust, easy to provision management and monitoring platform.

Oracle Container Cloud Service aims to solve exactly that problem. With comprehensive tooling to compose, deploy, orchestrate and manage container-based apps, Oracle container cloud enables rapid creation, deployment & management of enterprise-grade container infrastructure.

Let's take a peek under the hood;

Spin-up or Tear-down containers at-will:

Whether you are looking to quickly setup an infrastructure for testing your container apps or setting up a production-grade container infrastructure to run your apps, you can do it all with just a few clicks.

Oracle container cloud automatically provisions a manager node which will act as the "container management" server and you have the ability to configure the shape and size of the hosts on which your containers would run - called "worker nodes".

Group or Assign hosts to different pools for resource segregation using the "Resource Pools" feature.

In addition, "Tags" feature allows you to tag your resource pools, hosts, services and deployments. Tags provide fine-grained control over hosts/resource pools on which a service/stack can be deployed on.

Discover & Manage DNS information of all your running docker containers from the "Service Discovery" page.

BYOD (Bring Your Own Docker containers) or Start with example stacks:

Oracle container cloud links to the public docker hub registry out-of-the-box where you can pull from thousands of docker images. Whether you have a public docker repository or a private docker hub, you can add them to the container cloud docker registry.

If you are new to Docker containers, you can jumpstart with some of the in-built example services and stacks - Nginx, Apache HTTP server, Mongo, MySQL, MariaDB, Busybox, HAProxy, Wordpress etc..

Focus on building your apps and service stacks:

As I mentioned earlier, the operational complexity with containers and microservices is with the complex orchestration scripts, dependency management, scaling and deployment. Oracle container cloud stands-out in this respect - providing the ability to create single-click deployment of the entire stack, built-in service discovery, quick import existing Docker Run / Docker Compose YAML and on-click scale - all from a single pane of glass.

When it's time to fly:

After successful deployment of Docker containers, it's highly critical to gain insight into your container apps and services.
Oracle Container Cloud offers simple yet powerful monitoring & management dashboards to monitor container/host performance, container health, event audit logs. To top it, OCCS also maintains the running state of the app with self-healing application deployments.

Any modern cloud offering is never complete without REST APIs. OCCS offers complete suite of REST APIs to configure, deploy, administer, monitor, orchestrate & scale your container apps/services.

In my next article here, I will walk you through on how to deploy a full-stack Apache Kafka service with Zookeeper in minutes.

Eager to get started? Get a free trial of the Oracle Container Cloud here and let me know your feedback.

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