Oracle Java Cloud Service Reviews

Demoing. Two CPUs, 16GB memory.

Demoing is always an expensive process, from procurement of hardware to installation of software. Now, it is easier, cheaper, and more elastic.

Self-provisioning, easy to choose from WebLogic 11g to 12c. Customer has different requirements and it is easy to provision and choose the version of WebLogic within minutes.

Integration with other Oracle/non-Oracle products.

My primary use case for OJCS includes Java EE applications and ADF web sites on Weblogic Server running on cloud. They have added advantage of high availability and cloud-level security. Further implementations of middleware integration can be accomplished using Oracle SOA CS or Integration Cloud Service.

The concerns of server failure and unplanned downtime have been notably reduced. The automated features of auto-purging in 12c helps clear disk space on a routine basis.

• Getting to choose the Virtual Machine configurations while setting up the server, which is an automated process.
• The ability to manage security and access the server from any location with complete security using SSH is perfect for performing crucial tasks, even while travelling.
• OJCS can seamlessly connect to other cloud offerings like Oracle Database Cloud Service, Oracle Developer Cloud Service, Oracle Storage Cloud Service, etc. 
• The auto-backup, incremental backup and restoration features can be invaluable for management.

Most of the features provided are well designed and implemented. I'd like to learn more about WebLogic Server for solutions to help identify and resolve stuck threads.

I think it's pretty fast and, I feel, competent because the company is pretty big and things seem to be secure.

Reduces man-hours and speeds up business operations.

I feel like everything's running perfectly, so I don't have any improvements at the moment. But in terms of future features I would like it to be more helpful on the social media and marketing side.

It's stable. Durable. Can't break it.

It has scaled well.

Usually I'll just go to the contact list, either in email form or in a chat room. I think they are pretty efficient, speedy, and helpful if we have any incidents that happen on the server. It's pretty speedy customer service.

Make sure you network more. Get to know the techniques of the technology of Oracle and just expand it throughout your business and enlighten your employees.

It is easy to deploy and manage. The app server setup is intuitive and easy to follow.

It offers easy provisioning. We were able to get a server up and running in an hour.

I would like to see more monitors for standard edition

We have been using this solution for a year.

There were no deployment issues.

There were no stability issues.

The most valuable feature is that it is cloud-based. You don't have to acquire the software, install it on you machine or go through the trouble of procuring the hardware. You would then have to install and maintain everything and apply patches. With Oracle Java Cloud Service, in a few clicks, you can set up an entire WebLogic server in the AWS cloud services and the storage cloud services. It's really awesome. All this comes with a free subscription when you subscribe to Java Cloud Services. You also get the Developer Cloud Service at no cost.

I find this is pretty mature product. Mature in the sense that I’m getting the same Java in the cloud that I get with a locally installed version. So far, the only issue I have is with the storage cloud. The user needs to use the external REST API to set up the storage cloud servers. A developer that knows the REST API can easily do this. Other options, like the Java Cloud Service or Database Cloud Service, do have a UI option from the web application itself, where you can go and create an instance.

I’ve been using Oracle Java Cloud Service for the last few months. I find it pretty interesting, and very powerful for developers.

The Oracle Java Cloud Service is pretty stable. I haven’t had any issues since beginning a few months ago. Oracle is very prompt in sending an email when the system is going to be going into a maintenance mode, so I get a heads-up on that. That's really helpful.

Oracle JCS is scalable. You can extend and add extra managed services if you want. You can also add extra capacity with a few clicks.

The technical support is really good. I am usually able to contact an admin and we get a clear picture of the entire infrastructure; what is going on, where we can improve things. I didn't find any issues at all.

Setup it is pretty straightforward, but a few documents need to be updated here and there. For example, one of the documents describing how to create a storage cloud service doesn't mention that you need to use an authorization code.

Also, Oracle does need to work on a little bit integration with locally installed resources, although some of these issues have already been addressed with updates.

Definitely the first requirements I look for are reliability, security, and cost. Also, whether all of the products to talk to each other seamlessly. When you look at AWS, for example, its pretty stable. They provide the IaaS, infrastructure as a service, but if I want to have the features of the WebLogic or the database cloud service, Oracle, and the Java, I have to do all my development on the IaaS that AWS provides. Whereas, Oracle Java Cloud Service provides the platform and the IaaS.

Also, Oracle is in the process of migrating all their products, which have been traditionally locally installed, to the cloud. That gives me the advantage of interacting with other applications seamlessly.

The most valuable feature of the product is being able to test on multiple platforms for Oracle, for VMware, and so on.

I think there should be improvement with the speed and it should offer a more diverse selection of the suites that I can use.

I've only used it for a year and a half.

It is a stable product. There hasn’t been that much downtime. When that does happen, it's usually just a reboot, our systems are down, or the connections are slow.

So far, it has met my organization’s scalability needs.

I don't really interact with their support. I just submit a ticket and then some guy makes it work for me. So far, it's been pretty responsive because when I submit a ticket, it's usually a turnaround time of 24 hours.

They previously used VMware VSX. We’re moving to this solution now because we're trying to roll out our Oracle 12c upgrade, so we have to use that platform.

I recommend using it. It's not too far from what I was using before; it's just a matter of compatibility between different offerings.

The most valuable features of Oracle Java Cloud Service is the ability to develop applications on-premise, using well know IDEs (Oracle JDeveloper in our case) with the possibility to quickly deploy it to the cloud-based WebLogic Server. Also, the possibility to run applications that were initially deployed to IBM WebSphere albeit with some re-configuration and adjustments.

Fast, rapid and agile development and deployment of an ADF application (within Proof-of-Concept project) involves four developers in a distributed team (across two different time-zones) and through this they are able to cooperate quickly, without the usual problems of dev/test environment deployments.

We now have the ability to very quickly develop/modify and deploy applications (e.g. Proof of Concept, demos etc.) with a geographically distributed team using agile methodologies whilst avoiding environment specific problems such as long-time delays to restore an environment at a specific point in time, at the same time.

It needs to have the ability to create a service with the same name as another one when the initial creation failed as sometimes it's necessary to have a service with exact name. As far as I know, this problem is indicated as a "known issue" by Oracle, but this point is really needed sometimes.

You need to look into the Oracle Coherence optional offer as the description is not absolutely clear in some of the articles for beginners.

The most valuable feature is the ability to provision a platform of your choice, such WebLogic, BPM Suite and a lot of other FMW products. It's also easy to deploy a MW platform on the cloud. You don't have to worry about setting up the infrastructure; Oracle manages it. You just have to divert away existing licenses of the technology stack to the deployed platform on JCS.

It's shortened our time to market as we don't have to invest in data centers, computing resources and the underlying infrastructure. The proposition of Java Cloud Service is that, "Hey, here is a hosted platform for you on one of industries best application server i.e. Oracle WebLogic Server". Oracle will provide a platform, the hosting services, and the infrastructure. You just subscribe to a metered or non-metered usage and possibly extend the platform  using your existing Oracle's license on the product you are using. 

For instance, if you are using BPM Suite, you just purchase a BPM Suite license, build an Oracle BPM platform on top of JCS, and deploy your applications on top of it. Oracle will support the JCS infrastructure and you still get the ability to extend it to suite your needs.

You can scale up and scale down, have a high available infrastructure  and even do disaster recovery if you have Java Cloud Services deployed at two different availability zones. It's a very low-cost option for a business to start with. That's one of the best business reasons to move into JCS.

We've had some issues when Oracle released updates and patched the JCS environments without our knowledge. The proposition of Oracle JCS is that Oracle is going to give you the infrastructure, manage it, patch it, and upgrade it themselves. You just deploy your solutions on top of it and execute. Some of the automated platform patches broke our existing functionality and we were not notified about it. 

This means you're at Oracle's mercy, but again, we improved that process because Java Cloud Services as a service is maturing itself, and that's one of the problems that we had. 

There were a lot of configurations that we had to do to extend JCS with the FMW platform that we used, which was very manual and often error prone. We would like to have Oracle think about how can all the ongoing configurations that are applied on JCS be automated, or whether Oracle has a way to make sure the configuration drift is captured and there is a way to revert the environment back to its original state once something goes wrong.

Another area of improvement is to provide support for all critical components of the FMW platform such as WebLogic, SOA Suite and BPM Suite. When we started using JCS,  WebLogic 12.2.1 and BPM Suite 12.2.1 was supported on it but not SOA Suite 12.2.1. This makes adoption and usage of JCS harder in enterprises because when an enterprise wants to go to JCS, they want to either deploy one or all solutions particularly when they are integrated together. 

For instance, you will hardly see an enterprise which has BPM and not SOA, or SOA and not WebLogic. How do I move just my BPM on JCS and not SOA? That's what has been so difficult about it.

We have used JCS for a few of our customers for over 2 years.

Again, the deployment issues have to do with the fact that not all solutions can be integrated together.

We've had a some stability issues, but again, it was because when we adopted JCS, it was just released. It was in its nascent stages and you could possibly understand that there's going to be a few issues. However, it's improving over time.

We haven't had use cases where we have used deployed applications on JCS to support a big user base. We've used JCS for customers who have a user base of about 1,000 or 2,000, which is not a very big number. We've been pretty successful with that. Beyond that, we'll have to see. We know it can be scaled, and that's why we've invested in it.

It depends. If you have Java applications, you can subscribe to JCS from Oracle deploy your applications. If you have SOA or BPM, then you will have to provision those platforms on top of the JCS infrastructure that Oracle provides you. That is where it could possibly get challenging, but it depends on the nature of the product that you're trying to install on the JCS.

When you go to JCS, think about whether you want more than just the product and think about how you want to maintain the platform. It's a significant shift in the way you operate your IT. It's going to be a different proposition, it's going to be an infrastructure which is not managed by yourself in whole. You're just in the process of deploying to JCS.

A promising integration platform strategy is to ensure environments are delivered as a service on demand and ready to be consumed. Also customers may use JCS to run their FMW development environments but may want to have production environments on-premise. Unless there is a consistent and automated way of provisioning, ongoing configuration management, deployment, testing across both the MW platform on JCS and on-premise, it will be cumbersome to move applications between on-premise and JCS seamlessly.