Engaging the developer community in a cloud-native world

Soma Tah

The effervescent app economy along with a simultaneously rising consumer expectation have put the business under an immense pressure to build and deliver application faster. Traditional software delivery practices are no longer relevant in this scenario, as developers are looking to quickly create applications with microservices, APIs, containers, mobile backends and chatbots using modern DevOps processes.

The need for rich and robust platform capabilities to support these rapid development processes has also increased the appetite to switch to cutting-edge technologies.

To know more on this shift and other emerging trends in the app development sphere, we spoke to Ravi Pinto, Director – Product Management, Oracle Cloud Platform and Cloud machine.

Edited excerpt:

The shift from traditional monolithic development environment is obvious. Could you tell us about some interesting trends emerging from the new and faster development requirements?

Businesses, today, are looking at optimizing the development environment by moving the dev test to the public cloud and then eventually moving the production altogether in the public cloud.

Cloud-native development models in a microservices architecture will rise in prominence, to deliver products quickly to the business.

The increasing availability of low-code and no-code platforms will empower business to develop application specific to their requirements.

How is the app development scenario in India?

The readiness to try new technologies is the one thing that differentiates the vibrant developer community in India from the developer communities in the rest of the world.

There are two completely different sets of developers with completely different set of priorities and requirements. There are the developers who want complete control of the entire platform, while the other set of developers prefer to concentrate on the code, the functionality of the app, and they want the underlying services to be managed by the experts. We are trying to meet the requirements of both.

What has Oracle done to keep the developer community engaged? 

We are looking at more ways to engage with a wider base of developers worldwide including some of the vibrant open-source communities. We are trying to give back more to the community by open-sourcing some of our projects. We announced three new Open Source Container Utilities recently – Smith, a secure microcontainer builder; Crashcart, a microcontainer debugging tool and Railcar, an alternative container runtime.

We have done several partnerships in this regard. We are on Docker store. All our on-premise software will be available on Docker as Docker images. Developers can try these images by downloading them on any public cloud or on-premises servers. We have also committed to work with Kubernetes communities and will be adding more features to our platform using Kubernetes.

Are such engagements beneficial for Oracle?

A lot of developers who generally do not have any preconceived notions about any particular product are more open to try new things and are also not hesitant to contribute to the community. As they start using the platforms to build and host more and more applications- the interaction and collaboration that happens in the process helps to fix the bugs, and fine-tune the product for specific requirements.