Oracle OCI: It has queues!

Michael Mikhailidi -

Oracle OCI and Amazon AWS are similar and different at the same time. Yes, at the very basic, they offer you the same services - cloud infrastructure to run your workload, but AWS always dominated by the broad set of tools, features, and capabilities if you compare them by dozens.  

However, getting late to the battle is not always a bad thing. Yes, your competitors dominate the market; They may say that you have no experience, and your cloud customer base could be wider. But smart ones may gain an advantage of the knowledge and jump straight to the modern state bypassing rocky roads and having no technology debts. That is how I see the missing AWS features in OCI. Some are unnecessary due to the difference between the core architecture and better compartmentalization. For some of them, Oracle uses industry-acclaimed solutions (i.e., OCI and Terraform Stacks vs. AWS CloudFormation) with better results and positive feedback from the cloud community.  

Yet one significant feature was missed from the OCI components - queues. Of course, you can use Notification Service (ONS) to decouple your components, as people use AWS Simple Notifications instead of Simple Queue Service. The alternative was to build and maintain the custom solution: Database AQ, Kafka, or third-party queue management solutions.

But no Oracle offers ready-to-use Queues. The concept looks promising, yet, as of today, it is not entirely integrated with the other components. Still, it provides all the essential features:

  • Queues and DLQ
  • Security
  • Message lifecycle
  • Subscribers
  • Consumers

It comes with the RESTful API and ready-to-go SDKs for Java and Python.

I'm going to fiddle with this long-awaiting and exciting novelty and post more on queue integration with the other OCI components, especially with functions and another new feature: container instances.