Oracle is building generative AI capabilities for application development to take advantage of large language models with high security and privacy, CTO and Chairman and co-founder Larry Ellison said Tuesday in a keynote. However, the company made no specific AI announcements this week. Oracle plans to use generative AI to create applications with natural language capabilities that can access large amounts of data in a secure environment. The company is also exploring integrating these capabilities into its cloud products.
Ellison said that AI is “the most important technology of the 21st century that is going to change everything.” He also said that while AI is still in its early stages of development, it is already having a significant impact on the world.
Ellison also discussed the potential for AI to create new jobs and industries. “AI is going to automate many tasks that humans currently do, but it will also create new jobs that we can’t even imagine today,” he said.
Here are the key new additions to the OCI dev environment.
- Java, with an estimated 60 million developers using it frequently, remains a mainstay of development since its introduction at the outset of the internet in 1995. Oracle, which acquired Java’s originator, Sun Microsystems, in 2010, introduced a new set of capabilities for Java developers at the conference, including Java Development Kit 21, GraalOS, OCI Functions powered by GraalOS, and Graal Cloud Native 4.0.
- GraalVM is an alternative Java runtime that uses advanced GraalVM Native Image to enable deployed applications to run as native-machine executables. It enables low latency and fast start capability, reduces memory requirements, and improves efficiency by allowing applications to be suspended and resumed.
- GraalOS power OCI Functions is a fully managed, multitenant, highly scalable, on-demand Functions as a Service platform. It addresses the issue of slow cold starts by running functions as native executables, providing sub-second startup times. It uses GraalVM Native Image to reduce memory usage by up to 50 percent. It also uses out-of-the-box integrations to improve developer productivity.
- Graal Cloud Native 4.0 is a curated set of open-source Micronaut framework modules to help developers take full advantage of cloud services without dependency on proprietary APIs. It includes native support for GraalVM Native Image, Kubernetes integration, and distributed tracing.
In addition to these new capabilities for Java developers, Oracle is introducing new features for cloud-native deployments, Kubernetes operations, and enhanced security.
- Oracle Cloud Guard Container Governance enables developers to solidify security for Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) via predefined policies aligned to Kubernetes Security Posture Management. It simplifies the configuration of containerized workloads deployed on OKE.
- Oracle’s version of Serverless Kubernetes enables customers to ensure reliable operations at scale without the complexities of managing, scaling, upgrading, and troubleshooting the underlying Kubernetes node infrastructure.
