The Oracle catalog is a collection of cloud native application software provided by Oracle. Oracle CNE applications are delivered through the Oracle catalog. The Oracle catalog can be accessed in two ways, either using the embedded version in the CLI, or from a container deployed to a Kubernetes cluster.

The embedded catalog is built into the CLI, and is named embedded. This catalog can be accessed and queried without deploying a Kubernetes cluster.

The Oracle catalog can also be deployed to a cluster, and is named Oracle Cloud Native Environment Application Catalog. The CLI deploys the ocne-catalog container from the Oracle Container Registry to a cluster in the ocne-system namespace. The ocne-catalog container includes a Helm repository, and an instance of NGINX that serves the static content. While the Oracle catalog can be served anywhere that has a container runtime, it's primarily intended to be run within the Kubernetes cluster that consumes its contents.

The embedded Oracle catalog is updated when you update the CLI. The Oracle catalog container image is updated when you update Kubernetes, and isn't tied to CLI releases. This means that the catalog contents might differ.