Time to Leave WebLogic

One of my presentations at the German Oracle user group (DOAG) conference in Nürnberg this November is "Untangling Yourself from Oracle" - and a product you definitely need to untangle yourself from is the WebLogic server.

WebLogic has been a core part of Oracle's middleware since they bought BEA back in 2008. Back then, the most prominent middleware strategy was "One Application Server to Rule Them All." This means that WebLogic is a very big and complicated beast. Developers and administrators have been moving towards smaller and simpler application server solutions for a long time, as the 5-year Google Trend graph for WebLogic clearly shows.

This complexity comes with a cost.

One thing is that hiring expensive and rare specialists to keep this temperamental beast docile costs money. That is part of why IT organizations typically use 80% of their budget on running existing software and cannot afford innovation.

Worse, the WebLogic server is a perennial source of security vulnerabilities in the Oracle quarterly patch updates. Most updates fix at least one WebLogic issue of the scary kind that can be remotely exploited without authentication, and as recently as June, Oracle has to issue an unscheduled extra warning and patch for Weblogic. Did you notice? Did you patch?

You need to untangle yourself from Oracle WebLogic.

Best regards

Sten Vesterli
sten@vesterli.com