Oracle Corp. is aiming to make it easier for developers to connect containerized applications built on Kubernetes with its cloud services.

It’s an important move because Kubernetes has become the most popular software for managing container-based apps, which can be built just once and run on any computing platform. Oracle needs to support Kubernetes as best as it can, and to do so it’s announcing the general availability of a new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Service Broker for Kubernetes.

The service broker, announced at the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2019 event in Barcelona, is an implementation of the Open Service Broker application programming interface, which in turn is an open-source project designed to expose cloud services to both apps and their deployment tools. It’s designed specifically to be used with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services, which is a suite of Oracle products that include its Autonomous Database, hosted in its cloud data centers.

With the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Service Broker, developers can now connect to Oracle Infrastructure services natively from within Kubernetes via APIs. The company said this is a big deal because it can save developers heaps of time. That’s because Kubernetes automates the provisioning, configuration and management of each application’s infrastructure so they can quickly and easily connect to services such as Autonomous Data Warehouse and Automated Transaction Processing.

“With the continued adoption of DevOps and Kubernetes, developers want to streamline their automated deployment strategies to include provisioning and binding to any cloud service on which their application or microservice depends,” said David Cabelus, senior principal product manager of developer services at Oracle. “For example, if your application depends on object storage wherever the application is running, then provisioning storage buckets should be part of the deployment process for the application.”

The broker also helps enable application portability too, Oracle said. That means it’s easier to move apps across different cloud platforms, so users could migrate them between Oracle and another cloud provider, or on-premises, for example.

“The combination of a consistent model and embedding cloud service provisioning within your application deployment process means that when you deploy your application in a new cloud environment, it has everything that it needs to run,” Cabelus said.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Service Broker currently provides adapters for its Autonomous Transaction Processing, Autonomous Data Warehouse, Object Storage and Streaming services, with more to come in future. The broker is available as a Docker container or a Helm chart via GitHub, Oracle said.

In other news from KubeCon, Oracle also announced support for Oracle Java SE and Oracle GraalVM Enterprise Edition on its cloud infrastructure.

Oracle Java SE is the company’s software development kit for developers that use the Java programming language to write their apps. It offers a range of features to help with these tasks, allowing them to build apps for any cloud platform or operating system, and is being added at no additional cost. Meanwhile, GraalVM Enterprise bundles together a “high performance polyglot compiler, runtime, SDK and virtual machine” that are used to write and run apps written in languages such as JavaScript, Python, Ruby, R, JVM-based languages such as Java, Scala, Clojure, Kotlin and LLVM-based languages, including C and C++.

Both of the SDKs are now available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace via the Oracle Cloud Developer Image.

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