Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is introducing new capabilities that can boost the reliability and efficiency of large-scale Kubernetes environments while simplifying operations and reducing costs. The aim is to meet the growing demand for Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) with global organizations.

The latest updates to OKE enable customers to accelerate their journey to cloud-native and help them simplify their modernization efforts, innovate faster, and improve developer productivity. By helping customers offload infrastructure management to the cloud service, they are able to realize considerable cost savings across their expanding Kubernetes footprints.

The latest updates include:

• Virtual Nodes: Provide a serverless Kubernetes experience. They enable organizations to run Kubernetes-based applications at scale and help ensure reliable operations without the operational complexities of managing, scaling, upgrading, and troubleshooting the underlying infrastructure. Virtual Nodes further improve resource utilization by providing pod-level elasticity with usage-based pricing, helping customers optimize the cost of running Kubernetes workloads at scale.
• Add-Ons’ Lifecycle Management: Provides organizations with greater flexibility to install and configure their chosen auxiliary operational software or related applications. The service can manage the full lifecycle of this software, from initial set up and deployment through ongoing upgrades, patching, and more. This includes deployment, upgrades, configuration changes rollout, and more. Add-ons include essential software deployed on the cluster such as CoreDNS and kube-proxy, as well as access to a growing portfolio of optional software operators such as Kubernetes dashboard, Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic, and more.
• Workload Identity: Enables organizations to improve their security posture and lower management overhead with pod-level identity and access management controls.

Additional enhancements include increasing the default setting for newly-provisioned clusters to 2,000 worker nodes to more easily support larger clusters out of the box; support for preemptible (“spot”) instances to enable an additional 50 percent discount off on-demand VM pricing (to be available soon); and financially-backed SLAs for uptime and availability for the Kubernetes API server, in addition to the SLA already provided for the worker nodes.