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Docker and Oracle Solaris – Why All the Fuss About Containers?

Docker and Oracle Solaris.

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Oracle have just published an article on Docker in relation to Solaris and their applications – it can be found here.

Summary

 

“You don’t necessarily want to deal with virtualization every time, and containers are, in theory, this magical in-between,” says John Fowler, Oracle executive vice president of systems, who served as CTO of Sun’s software organization before Oracle acquired Sun in 2010. “People like to think about virtualization and containers as an either/or practice. What we’ve seen with Solaris—because we’ve been doing this for more than a decade—is that customers use both. But there are a couple of places where we go far beyond containers that I think are more exciting, since containers, at least to me, are not a new technology.”

Oracle Adds Database, Middleware Containers

Application containers are just one piece of today’s cloud deployment puzzle, and for enterprise-level deployments, a relatively small one. Docker-loving developers will be thrilled to discover the power of Solaris and Linux container technology in Oracle Database, in Java, and in WebLogic middleware—and even the attention paid to containers at the hardware level.

The new multitenant container architecture of Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition solves a multitude of common cloud deployment, scaling, and security troubles. More important, database containers dovetail with Oracle Executive Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison’s strategy to compete in all three tiers of cloud computing.

At Oracle OpenWorld 2016, Ellison announced the general availability of Oracle Container Cloud Service, which lets customers deploy microservices and scaled applications in the cloud with containers and official Oracle WebLogic Docker images.

“We diverge strongly from just having containers at the application level. We also have containers at our middleware and database levels,” Fowler says. “But the interesting and powerful part is that the containers in the middleware and database stack understand those pieces of software. So the whole administrative model is natural to the database as opposed to being separate.”

That means that deploying a new database need not be an onerous, one-off task. “Integrated into Oracle Database 12c is the container concept, which is that the database administrator has a bunch of different databases that can’t see or touch each other and can’t be administered separately, but now you don’t need multiple copies of the Oracle database,” Fowler says. “And this is super-efficient: A database container knows about database file formats, security, and administration.”

Docker, Solaris Containers Not the Same

Solaris and Linux containers are significantly different, Fowler says. Solaris containers offer full resource management, including I/O, network, CPU, and memory. They also integrate complete lifecycle management.

“As you patch the operating system and you patch the containers, that’s all an integrated capability,” he says. “You can also declare them as a virtualized container, in which case they run their own copy of the kernel. So they split the difference between virtualization and containers. You’re using the commands to create the container, but you can also give it a virtual machine, so you don’t have to deal with separate management. Linux containers don’t have that as well.”

One area that has dogged Docker is security, given that Linux containers require root operating system privileges and don’t have the strong OS kernel separation of a virtual machine.

Not surprisingly for a technology that has been in production for 10 years, Solaris containers boast a range of mature features for delegating administration and security. And Oracle continues to harden its commitment to security.

For example, the recently released Oracle MiniCluster S7-2 automates the deployment of secure containers and secure databases. Its one-button interface sets a company’s security compliance level and monitors it, Fowler says.

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