Oracle Looks to Boost Solaris Adoption with Support for Docker
When you think of cloud operating systems, Solaris usually isn’t the first one to jump out at you. If Oracle has their way, they’d like to change that. Oracle has announced its plan to help pump more Solaris based virtual machines into the cloud ecosystem by adding support for Docker.
By giving developers the ability to move code rapidly using containerization, Docker can certainly help increase the adoption of Solaris within cloud data centers worldwide. Oracle’s idea is to integrate Solaris Zones, the virtualization platform built into Solaris, with Docker to make deploying apps easier than ever.
“Today’s announcement really gives developers the best of both worlds – access to Oracle Solaris’ enterprise-class security, resource isolation and superior analytics with the ability to easily create containers in dev-test, production and cloud environments,” says Markus Flierl, a vice president at Oracle Solaris.
“Integrating Docker into Oracle Solaris will make that even easier and will help customers benefit from highly-integrated compute on premises and in the cloud,” added Flierl.
In addition to adding Docker support, Oracle will also release its popular Oracle WebLogic Server on Docker images. This can help developers test and deploy apps in a rapid fashion.
Oracle’s Solaris is part of the Unix family of operating systems; Research firm IDC estimates that 13.6% of cloud servers currently use Unix. The study went on to say that Windows servers tripled the Unix market share. Could Docker integration help push Unix to be a more mainstream cloud platform?
Last year, Oracle implemented OpenStack into its release of Solaris and more recent versions have included significant advances in virtualization technology. Oracle Solaris was once an OS thought to only have special use cases. With all of the cloud functionalities being included in the upcoming releases, Solaris is likely to become more widely used within organizations around the world.
