Introduction to Verrazzano
Container adoption has been on the rise in last several years. Containers provide rapid development, deployment and scalability and it can help us respond to changing business needs faster. Organizations have adopted Devops and inspire to achieve automation of complete application delivery lifecycle and containers play a key role in this process.
This trend is not only limited to new microservices based applications but also to traditional applications like WebLogic or Coherence based applications. Rewriting these traditional applications as microservices can be costly and risky task and there is no new functionality gain with the rewrite.
Organizations want to have a Unified Devops model for traditional as well as new microservices based apps.
It is also common to see Organizations using multiple cloud offerings from different vendors in order to avoid vendor lock-in.
One option is to have individual Kubernetes clusters running everywhere from on-premise to OCI to other public clouds. These individual Kubernetes clusters can host multiple applications that are either traditional or modern microservices based applications. We can use istio service mesh to provide features like canary deployment / circuit breaker etc. and tools like Prometheus/Grafana for observability.
We would also need to stitch together tools for observability, security , logging etc. for these individual clusters and all this would involve lot of heavy lifting.
We can manage these different Kubernetes clusters individually and manage application lifecycle for various disparate applications that are deployed across clusters and across clouds in a siloed approach.
Another option is to have a tool that can do all this heavy lifting for us and provide unified DevOps model for traditional and modern applications across Kubernetes clusters and across different public /private clouds.
Verrazano, a new offering from Oracle in Application Modernization space is an enterprise container platform that can help deploy and manage container based applications. It provides centralized management for new age applications that are built on frameworks like Helidon or Micronaut as well as traditional applications like WebLogic and Coherence with multi-cluster and multi-cloud support in mind.
So if you have traditional applications like WebLogic , Coherence and micro services based applications which are running across multiple Kubernetes clusters and in multiple clouds(OCI or other public clouds) or on-prem Kubernetes offerings , those can be deployed and managed centrally from one place which is Verrazzano.
Verrazzano is an extension to Kubernetes Cluster that can be installed on Prem or Cloud and help you modernize existing enterprise-grade custom applications using Kubernetes in a cloud neutral way to deploy and manage any container workload across clouds. It complements to existing AppDev Tools that exist today.
With Verrazano, you cannot only manage WebLogic , Coherence , Helidon/Micronaut, Spring boot based applications but also node.js and other non-Java frameworks based applications.
Verrazzano uses WebLogic Operator and the Coherence Operator to assist with deploying and managing WebLogic Server and Coherence workloads. Verrazzano transparently handles the installation and configuration of WebLogic Operator and the Coherence Operator abstracting us from low level details of these operators.
Verrazzano provides CNCF based tooling for DevOps, Observability, logging, monitoring, service mesh for any modern application out of the box in a pre-stitched manner.
In Verrazzano, several popular tools like Grafana , Prometheus , Elasticsearch, Kibana and Rancher are stitched together to form an enterprise grade solution to empower you in your Application Modernization Journey.
Lastly, Verrazzano adopts Open Application model which is a runtime-agnostic specification for defining cloud native applications; As a result all our applications developed in different Technologies get represented in a uniform manner so it becomes easy to manage them. Open Application Model makes it easy to use many different workload types. Verrazzano includes specific workload types with special handling to deploy and manage those types, such as WebLogic, Coherence, and Helidon. So a grouping of these different applications is managed as a single unit but still each component can be scaled or updated independently.
Please refer below documentation to do your first Verrazzano lab.
https://verrazzano.io/docs/samples/application-deployment-guide/
