Today we are going to move up the stack. We will first focus on the Oracle solutions talking about the different platform as a service offerings. It is important to spend a little time reviewing this layer because what one company calls PaaS, another calls SaaS. The best way to get started is to go to cloud.oracle.com and look at the pull downs at the top of the screen. We see Infrastructure, Platform, and Applications.
When we pull down the Platform menu we see that there are different areas that we can dive into.
Data management is the first area that we will review. This is basically a way to aggregate and look at data. We can store data in a database, store on-premise databases into the cloud, store data in NoSQL repositories, and do analytics on a variety of data with Big Data Preparation and Big Data services. All of these involve pulling data into a repository of some type and performing queries against the repository. The key difference is the way that the data is stored, how we can ask questions, and the results that we get back. At this point we will not dive into any of these deeply but at a later point dive deep into the database and database backup.
The Application Development is moving farther away from the technology of storing data and moving closer to how we present data to users. The Java platform, for example, allows us to do things like create a shopping cart or hosting more complex applications in a Java repository or container. The Mobile Cloud Service allows us to dive into existing applications and present a user interface to iPhones, Android Phones, and tablets. The idea is to customize existing web and fat clients into a mobile format that can be consumed on mobile devices. The Messaging Cloud Service is a messaging protocol that allows for transactions in the cloud. If you are looking at connecting different cloud services together it allows you to serialize the communication between vendors for a true transactional experience. The Application Container Cloud is a lightweight Java container allowing you to upload and run java applications but without access to the operating system. This is a shared multi-tenant version of a WebLogic server. The Developer Cloud Service is a DevOps integration for the Java and Database services. This service is an aggregation of public domain components used to develop microservices at the database or java layer. The Application Builder Cloud Service is a cloud based REST api development interface allowing you to integrate with Application software in the Oracle Cloud as well as other Clouds. The API Catalog is a way of publishing the REST apis that you have and expose them to your customers.
The Content and Process Cloud Services are an aggregation of services that address group communications as well as business process flow. The Documents Cloud Service is a way of file sharing on the web. The Process Cloud Service is an extension that allows you to launch business processes (think Business Process Manager or BPM) in the cloud. The Sites Cloud Service is a web portal interface that takes documents and processes and aggregates them into a single cloud site allowing you to take a wiki like presentation but put business processes into the presentation. The Social Network Cloud Service allows you to integrate social network services like Facebook and Twitter into your web presence. It allows you to integrate these services as well as search these repositories for information relating to your company.
The Business Analytics part of Platform services provides data visualization and analytic tools as well as data aggregation utilities. The Business Intelligence component is the traditional BI package that allows users to create custom queries into your database. The Big Data Preparation allows you to aggregate data from a variety of sources into a Big Data repository. The Big Data Discovery allows you to look at your data in a variety of ways and generate reports based on your data and views of data. The Data Visualization Cloud Service allows you to view and analyze your data from different perspectives. This is similar to the BI and Big Data but looks at data slightly differently. The Internet of Things Cloud Service allows you to aggregate monitoring and measuring devices into a repository.
The Cloud Integration part of Platform services is the traditional data aggregation tools from other repositories. The Integration Cloud Service allows you to aggregate traditional SaaS vendors to unify fields like how a customer is defined or what data elements are incorporated into a purchase order. The SOA Cloud Service is implementation of the Oracle SOA Suite in the cloud. The GoldenGate Cloud Service is an implementation of the Oracle Golden Gate software that allows you to take data from different databases and synchronize the different repositories independent of the database vendor. The Internet of Things Cloud Service is the same listed in the Business Analytics section mentioned before.
The Cloud Management part of Platform services allows you to take the log files that you have inside your data center and analyze them for a variety of things. You can aggregate your log files into the Log Analytics Cloud Services to look for patterns, intrusion attempts, and problems or issues with services. The IT Analytics Cloud Service looks at log files and looks for trends like disks filling up, processors being used or not used appropriately. The Application Performance Cloud Service looks at log files to look at how systems and applications are operating rather than how systems are working rather than how components are working.
In Summary, we looked at an overview of the Platform as a Services offered by Oracle. Unfortunately, the variety of topics are too great for one blog. We did a high level overview of these services. In upcoming blogs we will dive deeper into each of these services and look at not only what they are but how they work and how to provision these services. We will also compare and contrast how these services compare to services offered by Amazon and Azure as we dive into each service.