The central theme of Oracle Open World 2014 has certainly been the Cloud. Downtown San Francisco was laced with banners about Oracle and Cloud. The difference compared to last year is that now there is a huge amount of real cloud products available (or soon to be launched). Where the Oracle cloud offering till this summer was limited to Database and Java (WebLogic) and some applications the current stack ranges from infrastructure till a range of SAAS offerings. The amount of cloud related announcements was really huge and somewhat overwhelming. Get things in perspectives I have drafted below a list of the concrete cloud offerings with a short description. If you want to try this in practice you are welcome to visit https://cloud.oracle.com/home (choose the platform tab to see what’s currently available).

The major theme of all Oracle cloud based solutions is REST support for all commands. So you can use either Cloud Control / Enterprise Manager to manage your cloud infrastructure or you can directly tap into the specific systems and manage them yourself. In this way you can customize the management of your infrastructure for specific services without having to use the Cloud Control.

Overview of all cloud offerings Oracle has introduced last week at Oracle Open World 2014

Oracle Managed Cloud Services (OMCS) (IAAS)

This is the basis of the complete cloud services. The actual infrastructure behind the cloud offerings in the form of networking, virtual servers and security. The beg announcement on this field it Oracle’s full support for Open Stack infrastructure (http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/2321794). This is based upon the OpenStack Icehouse release and enables you to use OpenStack for provisioning all of your Oracle Software Defined Networking. And also enables a self-service console for Oracle Linux and Oracle VM.

Within the Oracle Cloud Managed Services you can use the Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance to offer the basics of services within your virtual network. This is the cloud version of the On Premise Compute Appliance.

When building new infrastructure in the Oracle IAAS Cloud you can choose the location of the datacenter you want to use. This is important if you want to run your applications in a datacenter close to your major customers (US, Ireland, Australia). The underlying technology building the cloud services will make sure the components of your cloud infrastructure will be stored as closely as possible within the datacenter to ensure minimum of networking latency. Via the security keys you install on your own services you able to create a secure connection to you IAAS infrastructure or even make it a part of your local network.

Oracle Platform as Service in the Cloud (PAAS)

On top of the IAAS solution Oracle is currently offering a large range of Platforms As A Service (PAAS)form the cloud. This is an addition on the already available Java Cloud and Database Cloud.

Database Cloud (DBAAS)

The database cloud now offers the ability to seamlessly upgrade and maintain Oracle Database software as a Service. In the managed model you are able to create and upgrade your Oracle Database on the Datacenters of Oracle. And with the introduction of Oracle 12.1.0.2 you are also able to offer the Database In Memory option from the cloud database. The database cloud offers root access to administrators and delivers direct access to the data source in the way you are used to when using a local database (port 1521). Via the Oracle Cloud Managed Services you are also able to define a database connection via port 80 or 443 to prevent networking issues while connecting to a data source outside your company’s internal datacenter.

Next to the self-managed database you can choose for a managed Cloud Database. When you are opting for the Managed Cloud Database Service Oracle offers 5 sizes in database cloud, 5 different service levels and 4 security levels.

On the Database Cloud Service you can choose for a block storage backup or to use the Cloud Backup Service from Oracle via RMAN. At this time the Database Cloud offers versions 11c release 2 and 12c release 1.

Java Cloud

The Java Cloud offering, also called WebLogic Cloud, is a full version of WebLogic Server as a cloud instance. Including the usage of Coherence as a data grid within the WebLogic Server to share data and transactions between several applications without using the round-trip to the database. At this time Oracle is offering WebLogic 11c and 12c as a cloud service. Within the cloud dashboard you are able to create and scale your Java cloud service as you like (scale up and scale out).

Security cloud Services

Oracle has made security a high priority within the cloud services offering. This is essential for the complete cloud offering. The the security cloud service offers firewall, intrusion detection and anti-virus to protect the system from treats from outside the infrastructure and prevent systems being attacked by systems within the cloud infrastructure. This offering enables you to configure your cloud system to be compliant with a lot of regulatory frameworks (http://www.oracle.com/us/media1/service-cloud-security-overview-2030360.pdf)

Developer Cloud

New announcement is the developer cloud is a new offering consisting of tools for software repository, wiki, issue / task tracking and build engine. The developer cloud will be released in the upcoming moth. A trial version is already available. According to my information the Developer Cloud is free together with the Java Cloud.  With the developer cloud you are able to create a GIT repository (or multiple) and invite your team to participate. You can connect your own IDE (Eclipse, JDeveloper etc.) to this repository and work just as you were used to work. The developer cloud offers an issue tracking system based upon the schema of Bugzilla with an integrated interface and REST interfaces to create and tasks from your own IDE. The build engine in the developer cloud is based upon Mave3 and Hudson. And finally you can use a wiki in the developer cloud to enrich your documentation. The developer cloud is aimed on working in agile projects and supports easy and fast review, collaboration and quick integration. The developer cloud offers to create and use templates. This enables you to create a template of a specific type of project and use this as a basis for following similar project while copying a pre format setup of the source repository, build engine and wiki.

Integration Cloud (SOA / Service Bus )

This service enables the SOA and OSB users to leverage the advantages of integration with Service Bus and SOA and the scalability and availability of cloud systems. This product is announced on Open World and it looks like it is being launched introduced in the upcoming months. Before this service is launched, we will first see the ICS (Integration Cloud Service) – to be launched in the next six months or so. This service is targeted at not-very-technical-users, to allow them to create fairly straightforward integrations between SaaS products. A very interesting part of this is the Cloud Adapter SDK. Integration Cloud Services (ICS) offers a lot of new SaaS adapters to integrate with SaaS applications like SalesForce for example. The cloud adapters are built in the Cloud Adapter SDK and written in Java. So you are able to create your own adapter an share this adapter with your users. http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/adapters/documentation/index.html

Process cloud

Another new service is the Process Cloud. This is the cloud implementation of BPM with the goal of offering a simplified and comprehensive way of modeling and executing your processes. The goal is to migrate the BPM creation activities from the developer to the business analyst. The process cloud is being launched soon. Examples are available here : https://cloud.oracle.com/process

Analytics Cloud / BI Cloud

This is the Business Intelligence offering as a cloud service. This service is being made available as a separate offering and as an BI Engine on other Oracle applications like Oracle Eauola and Oracle RightNow. (https://cloud.oracle.com/business_intelligence).

Mobile Cloud and Mobile Application Accelerator (MAX)

Oracle Mobile cloud is an extensive way to make your own services available as a mobile backend. The mobile could offers services to create data providers within for your mobile developer without bothering them with the complexity of your enterprise backend. Including shielding the security of your connection from your mobile developers. The mobile cloud offers several features for reporting and analytics such as usage statistics and engagement. This service will probably be launched in a few months (https://cloud.oracle.com/mobile) . A second interesting announcement was the introduction of MAX ( Mobile Application Accelerator). The Oracle Mobile Application Accelerator feature allows users with no coding experience to rapidly and intuitively produce mobile applications. This feature is only announced and it is not clear when it will be available for usage.

Big Data Cloud

The Big Data Cloud offers you the ability to store and analyze your big data as a service. This Big Data cloud is based on Hadoop. The cloud service offers fully serviced and elastic capabilities. The advantage of this platform is that it is able to store petabytes of data and enables you to connect to your local and on premise systems.

Oracle Documents Cloud

The next-gen cloud-based file sharing and collaboration solution. Built for the enterprise with robust security, application integration and support for on-premise ECM integration.

Software as a Service SAAS

And finally Oracle applications: Social, Finance, HCM, Logistics, Marketing..etc. These are all available as cloud service. This makes Oracle form this standpoint the biggest SAAS provider at this moment (according to Larry Ellison).

This article is based upon the findings during my visit to Open World 2014. I cannot assure the list is complete and I will add more information or correct as new offerings are introduced. And please share your feedback below.