On August 1, Oracle announced the general availability in all commercial regions of Oracle Functions, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s functions-as-a-service (FaaS) platform.

Shaun Smith, who leads Serverless product management at Oracle and is a member of the open source Fn Project functions platform team, explained in the announcements that Oracle Functions makes it easy to build Cloud-native applications by letting developers focus on writing code rather than managing infrastructure. With Oracle Functions, you simply write, deploy, and call your function. There are no servers involved to provision, monitor, or upgrade.

Functions as a Service Overview

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 is no charge for idle time. Oracle Functions is also autoscaling, so if your functions experience a surge in usage, the platform scales up to handle the load and then scaled down when usage declines. This saves you money and eliminates the need to forecast peak demand and manage resource allocation. 

“We have an end-to-end Java framework for developing mobile enterprise applications. We created a mobile messaging application in Java, and when the user hits the ‘send’ key, his message is processed and optionally stored in a database. Oracle Functions is a very good fit for our bursty workload. It allows our Java functions to be executed on-demand, and we only pay for what we used – without worrying about scalability and availability. Furthermore, the integration capabilities with other Cloud services make it easy to leverage other functionality.”

-Johan Vos, CTO at Gluon

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. By building on open source, Oracle gives customers 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.

With Oracle Functions, customers know that their code is running on a platform that has 24/7 worldwide support. By running Oracle Functions, deployed functions will automatically take advantage of new generations of processors and networking technology when they become available.

Although it is built on open source, Oracle Functions is seamlessly integrated with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform. This means that customers can:

• 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
• Monitor your functions and access logs by using the Monitoring and Logging services

Oracle Functions makes it easy to build serverless applications that take full advantage of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure platform.

Additional Resources

You can find Oracle Functions under Developer Services in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console, where you can create, configure, and monitor your function applications. To get up and running with functions, use the Quick Start Guide. For full-service details, check out the Oracle Functions online documentation.