Oracle Adds Oracle Linux Images to Docker Hub Registry

How the Data Center Will Grow Up in Three Years

Looking to take advantage of the growing enthusiasm for Docker containers among application developers, Oracle today announced that images of Oracle Linux are now available on the Docker Hub Registry.

Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president for Linux and virtualization engineering at Oracle, says Oracle wants to make it simpler for developers to select an operating system stack at the same time they are downloading other components from the Docker Hub Registry, which in effect is rapidly becoming a central distribution point for software that supports Docker containers.

Oracle also announced that it will provide a new MySQL image for Docker Hub in late February that will be maintained by Oracle as an alternative to the MySQL image currently available on the Docker Hub Registry.

With multiple distributions of Linux now contending to be the preferred platform for running applications based on Docker containers, Coekaerts says Oracle sees the emergence of Docker containers as a validation of its application-centric approach to virtualization.

Rather than concentrating on infrastructure, Coekaerts says the primary benefit of containers is that they make it easier to isolate application workloads in a way that makes the IT environment more manageable. Couple that with the automatic update capabilities that Oracle provides, and the total cost of managing an enterprise IT environment becomes substantially less, says Coekaerts.

Coekaerts says it’s too early to say how many containers will wind up running on top of either physical servers or virtual machines. But given the massive investments that most IT organizations have made in virtualization over the past decade, Coekaerts says the odds are high that most IT organizations would prefer to apply an existing common management framework to both virtual machines and containers alike.