Java EE on Azure with WebLogic and Linux Virtual Machines
Microsoft wants to help you run Java EE on Azure. This blog post announces the availability of four Azure marketplace offers jointly developed with Oracle. These offers let you easily run WebLogic Server on Microsoft Azure Linux Virtual machines in a variety of ready-to-use configurations.
But wait, I have a Java EE monolith
Most of the breathless excitement in the journey to the cloud centers on transforming your monolith into microservices. That’s exciting. Who doesn’t love getting down and dirty tearing up some old code, reducing technical debt, and using all the shiny new things? Not surprisingly, it turns out there are times when a much less disruptive approach is more appropriate. The team may no longer have sufficient developer resources. But still have the responsibility for maintaining the system and moving it to the cloud. Or maybe they do have developer resources. But rather than go straight from monolith to microservices, they need to get a good approximation on some cloud first. Then develop the microservices approach alongside, as a parallel effort. As a result, the lift and shift approach can be appropriate.
Lift and shift is especially attractive for the platform that popularized the monolith in the first place: Java EE. In spite of all the well known problems associated with monolithic deployment there are still plenty of workloads out there that are good candidates for Java EE on Azure.
Wherever you are on your cloud journey
At Microsoft, we have Enterprise Java solutions for all of the different stages in your cloud journey. We have Lift and Shift on IaaS. Also Containers. And Azure Kubernetes Service. Don’t forget Azure RedHat OpenShift. And most recently the full microservices ready Azure Spring Cloud service.
This blog post announces the availability of some Azure IaaS offers that bring Java EE to Azure in the form of WebLogic Server (WLS), a scalable, enterprise-ready Java Platform, Enterprise Edition 7 (Java EE 7) application server.
Announcing: WebLogic Java EE on Azure IaaS
This release of WLS on Azure IaaS enables you to do simple things like stand up a single node WebLogic server with an admin server, ready to accept deployments. Above all, we
let you set up a cluster for high availability and scaling. To round out the simple use cases, we also support easily connecting several popular databases already available in Azure.
The release includes the following four offers for running WebLogic Server 12c (12.2.1.3) on Oracle Linux 7.4 with Oracle JDK 8u131.
- Single Node with no Pre-configured Domain After provisioning the offer, you’ll have a single VM with WLS installed, but you still must configure any domains you might want to use.
- Single Node with Pre-configured Domain and Admin Server After provisioning, you’ll have a single VM with WLS installed, a domain created, and the admin server started and awaiting your commands.
- N-Node Cluster After provisioning, you’ll have N VMs with a WLS cluster started on them, with a node manager and admin server. and the admin server started and awaiting your commands.
- N-Node Dynamic Cluster After provisioning, you’ll have N VMs with a WLS dynamic cluster started on them, with a node manager and admin server. And the admin server started and awaiting your commands.
All of the offers come with the standard JDBC database drivers supported by WLS and also pre-installed drivers for PostgreSQL and Azure SQL Server. For the cluster offers, scripts are provided to easily connect to Oracle Database, Azure PostgresQL and Azure SQL server.
Please visit the official documentation for complete details on how to use the offers. We look forward to helping you along on your cloud journey.
Pricing and Support
The pricing for all of these offers follows the Bring-Your-Own-License model. This means whatever your existing license agreement is with Oracle, you can bring that to Azure, where you will of course have to pay for the Azure resources under the Azure pricing model. As for support, there are two things to keep in mind. 1. The infrastructure support will come from Microsoft, while the WebLogic support will come from Oracle. 2. If you are using the cross-cloud interconnect, the support policies announced in the Oracle Microsoft Press-Releases apply:
- https://news.microsoft.com/2019/06/05/microsoft-and-oracle-to-interconnect-microsoft-azure-and-oracle-cloud/ “A collaborative support model to help IT organizations deploy these new capabilities while enabling them to leverage existing customer support relationships and processes.”
- https://www.oracle.com/cloud/oci-azure.html “A collaborative support model between Oracle and Microsoft: Includes joint support enabling you to leverage your existing Oracle or Microsoft customer support relationships and processes.”
If this looks interesting to you, click the big blue button below, try it out, and give us feedback. Take the survey at https://aka.ms/migration-survey. Do the survey and you can take advantage of hands-on help from the engineering team behind these offers. We can build a customized Proof-of-Concept of the solutions running in your enterprise.
What’s Next
We will be improving these offers to make it easier to integrate with databases, logging, identity, and caching. Also, our roadmap includes creating more offers for other popular Java EE application servers.
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