OpenStack Is Now A Part Of Oracle

Open source cloud technology called OpenStack has been plugged into Oracle. The new public cloud service will be released in the market soon, packed with advanced technology and improvements. The OpenStack addition was announced at Oracle OpenWorld conference on Tuesday.

OpenStack has recently received a lot of code contributions from various companies including Red Hat, NASA, HP and Rackspace. It is one of the most recognized cloud open source platforms of the world. With the addition of it, Oracle has sent a clear message to Amazon, Microsoft and Google. These current dominant public cloud providers are clearly challenged by Oracle’s new integration. Rackspace, AT&T and HP already make use of OpenStack and have provided good public cloud services in the past through it.

The Oracle IaaS cloud will see an increase in performance due to OpenStack Swift API. Storage manipulations in the public cloud will be easier and faster. Thomas Kurian, who is the senior vice president of product development at Oracle mentioned that Oracle will use OpenStack for deployment, provisions and management of basic cloud assets besides from just implementing API compatibility.

Oracle is clearly trying to overcome the possibilities of lock-ins during transfers. Using Swift and Nova for computing and building applications, both of them are OpenStack APIs, users will be able to export data out of Oracle into any other cloud without the risk of losing data or application breaking. According to Kurian, Oracle wants to provide a cloud environment in which workloads can be easily handled without going into a programming language.

Oracle has produced some code for OpenStack. This code will be used only by Oracle for their own cloud services. The additions and new code will not be provided to any community. In fact, Oracle will not provide the code even in its official release packages. They have taken a step similar to many other companies by doing this. Linux has been used a lot by different organizations in the past. Most of them did not contribute anything to the wider communities even after developing huge codebases. There is a high chance that Oracle will be criticized for not providing code to communities. This is because Oracle is one of the biggest names in IT today and OpenStack is still quite new in the open source market. Most people believe that influential companies like Oracle should help in improving open source platforms such as OpenStack instead of keeping them for themselves.

The public cloud is all set to run around the world through 13 data centers. The cloud will provide database controls along with computing and storing services.  Users can also use mobile services, document syncing and cloud database backups. Bonus software will be a part of the standard package which will include features and services that can be used with the public cloud.

Kurian has stated that the cloud is being used by over 21.5 million users. The users span 163 countries and 18,000 companies are currently using it. Oracle is currently dealing with about 205 petabytes of storage, so OpenStack was a necessary addition.