Oracle has announced the general availability in all commercial regions of Oracle Functions, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s functions-as-a-service (FaaS) platform.
The announcement was made in an August 1 blog post by Shaun Smith, who leads serverless product management at Oracle and is a member of the open source Fn Project functions platform team.
According to Smith, Oracle Functions makes it easy to build serverless applications that take full advantage of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform, and supports the building of cloud-native applications by letting developers focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure.
“Functions are ideal for dealing with event-driven or intermittent workloads, as well as workloads with spiky usage patterns. Functions pricing is pay-as-you-go, so there’s no charge for idle time,” writes Smith. “Why pay for a function that’s doing nothing? Oracle Functions is also autoscaling, so if your functions experience a surge in usage, the platform scales up to handle the load and then scales down when usage declines. This saves you money and eliminates the need to forecast peak demand and manage resource allocation.”
According to Smith, Oracle Functions is built on the Apache 2.0 licensed Fn Project, which can be used anywhere, from a developer laptop to a cloud compute platform, and customers have the option to operate their own functions service in-house or use the cloud-scale Oracle Functions platform to avoid the costs associated with managing infrastructure. “By deploying to Oracle Functions, customers can rest easy knowing that their code is running on a platform that has 24x7 worldwide support. And by running on Oracle Functions, deployed functions will automatically take advantage of new generations of processors and networking technology when they become available.”
Although Oracle Functions is built on open source it is integrated with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform, enabling users to restrict access to a function, and the resources that a function can access, by using Identity and Access Management; interact with services, including Object Storage, Streaming, and Compute, from a function by using the SDK; and monitor their functions and access logs by using the Monitoring and Logging services.
More information is available from the Quick Start guide, and from Oracle Functions online documentation.