Mirantis Kubernetes Engine vs. Oracle WebLogic Server

Docker is great for when you would want to use a VM for any given application, but don't need the overhead of the whole OS. Docker containers use very little computing resources, boot up very quickly, and are very easy to set up. An instance where Docker may not be appropriate would be for an application that requires good security. If in this situation, a true VM would probably be your best bet.

Incentivized

I see Oracle WebLogic Application Server being appropriate when an application needs several different data sources and messaging providers configured and accessible, with a configured level of control of resources (connection pools) and timeouts. It is also advisable to create distributed resources that you can configure as always active to provide more processing power, or as failover for situations of availability in case of disaster recovery, for example. An application where the number of required resources configured is very small and almost non-changeable, and no scalability is required, some other options exist in the market with less cost.

Incentivized

• Containerization - allowing multiple micro-services to function together without in-depth orchestration at the VM level.
• Rapid deployment - a developer with appropriate access can simply push to the correct remote and the deploy happens automatically from there
• Decouples provisioning from VM administration - allows containers to be deployed (more) regardless of VM set up.

Incentivized

• I love that the weblogic dashboard allows you to manage applications and see the status of each application.
• Oracle WebLogic Application Server simplifies usage periods in the development and production of business applications.
• Oracle WebLogic Server allows me to define various aspects of data source entry, including creating a specific multiple connection to facilitate data entry.
• Performance and administration are highlighted in weblogic.

Incentivized

• Docker has a bit of a learning curve, and it takes some time to become familiar with the tooling and syntax. Transitioning an existing architecture to docker can represent a significant investment.
• Docker attempts to provide some level of cross-host container orchestration via swarm, but it falls short of third-party solutions like kubernetes.
• We occasionally run into stability issues when the docker daemon is subjected to high load (many applications starting/stopping frequently). In these cases, docker hangs and we have to restart or replace the node.

Incentivized

• The Admin UI should be further simplified, the UI design was not too user-friendly— too many options and clicks required, difficult for the new beginners to figure out what they are looking for.
• The admin server becomes the single failure point, although Oracle suggested some workarounds by setting VIP and VHost, it was not quite easy and straight forward.
• Domain replication is hard, requiring a lot of knowledge and scripts efforts.
• Admin will hang if the node manager communication encounters some issues for one or some nodes in the domain/cluster.
• Not able to kill/terminate the stuck thread, the only way is to restart the managed server (JVM)
• License cost is too high, for small businesses.

Incentivized

Docker's CLI has a lot of options, and they aren't all intuitive. And there are so many tools in the space (Docker Compose, Docker Swarm, etc) that have their own configuration as well. So while there is a lot to learn, most concepts transfer easily and can be learned once and applied across everything.

Incentivized

Oracle WebLogic Server has so many features that sometimes it's hard to find the right place to setup things, I think the dated user interface does not help with that either. This has a direct impact when deciding to use it as your application server, you'd need to have the right people and invest the time needed to master it. If you're application justifies it then it will definitely be a great choice in the long run.

Incentivized

Oracle WebLogic Application Server is great at security, performance and features.

Incentivized

The community support for Docker is fantastic. There is almost always an answer for any issue I might encounter day-to-day, either on Stack Overflow, a helpful blog post, or the community Slack workspace. I've never come across a problem that I was unable to solve via some searching around in the community.

Incentivized

The Oracle support is not great sometimes. They take a long time and need a lot of data over and over to resolve issues.

Incentivized

I have not used any other software as a container management solution. Its containerized apps allow the usage of less memory, thus
they start and shut down very fast. This tool is helping the enterprise
software to work quickly against the changing conditions thus offers great
scaling by simultaneously allowing me to meet the demands, which also leads to
easy implementation of the strategies.

Incentivized

I wasn't involved in selecting the server we were using but in our team we've made some efforts to improve the local deployment process by trying some other Applicational servers too. Apache Tomcat was a more lightweight solution for sure, and it coped well with our applications needs, configuration and performance wise. Despite that, since we didn't got clearance to change that into our local servers, we kept using Weblogic to guarantee compliance between the testing environments and production.

Incentivized

• We are able to try things very quickly compared to before. If you need to debug it, changes on X/Y/Z will have an impact on the way your app works, and changing libraries or configurations of the environment easily can improve your development cycles.
• In case someone new arrives, the onboarding is pretty easy thanks to Docker. We have tried many configs and images until we reached a point were we have what we want. We don't have to painfully do that again for every new user. We just send him the image.

Incentivized

• It made it easy to handle over a 100 of deployments across multiple nodes every quarter.
• It was easy to scale up our application to 36 nodes as the volume of transactions increased over the years.
• Helped us achieve 99.999 availability for our users.

Incentivized