Today let’s dig a bit into running WebLogic 14 in Kubernetes.
History
A bit of history, at least from my perspective. Since WebLogic 12, Oracle has “supported” running WebLogic in a Docker container. Before this, WebLogic seemed to not really interact well with Docker, so things like exposing ports did not work. That’s kind of an important thing to do for a web server.
WebLogic 12 though does run fine inside of a container. Oracle provides a version of this beast on Docker Hub. If you follow this for a while, you may notice that it does take Oracle some time to update these images to latest versions. You will also notice that WebLogic 14 is missing.
Now, for Kubernetes. WebLogic had, or has, a project called the WebLogic Kubernetes Operator. At the time I looked into this, it seemed very much an after-thought. The idea seemed to be some mingling of the WebLogic admin server and Kubernetes. However, the biggest reason we abandoned digging deeper into this project was that it looked like it relied on a (human) operator going in and deploying the application. Like any rational software business in this decade, we did not want our production deployments to ride on somebody dragging a file somewhere and clicking buttons in a UI.
WebLogic 14
If you checked out the Docker Hub for WebLogic 14 images, you would have noticed there are none. That’s because Oracle likes to hold things close to their vest (and because it seems they have difficulty building actually functional Docker images). You will need to check out their GitHub repo and build the image yourself.
The instructions there do not yet say anything about WL 14, but the files are there. The build for 14 should work just fine. Following similar instructions as those for WL 12 should work for you.
This was a bit of an into. Next week we’ll take a look at what you actually need to do to get WL 14 up and running in Kubernetes.