As Oracle integrates OpenStack cloud with its technologies, the community asks: Will Oracle really embrace the open-source code spirit?

Despite recent pessimism, Oracle on Wednesday announced significant new support for OpenStack in an exceptionally ambitious manner, frequently saying that it’d support OpenStack as a management framework across an expansive list of Oracle products. 

I do not believe you may get rather more validation of OpenStack’s importance one day of the enterprise data center than this endorsement. Remember, Oracle is the corporate that trumpeted a “cloud” strategy that was, in effect, to recreate IBM’s mainframe heydays of the 1960s. Oracle is the epitome of a standard enterprise vendor and to have it announce this level of support for OpenStack is astonishing.

It’s also an indication of the days.

Obviously, the primary, most-important question in all of this can be: Can Oracle engage positively with the open-source meritocracy that OpenStack represents? Admittedly, at the start blush it’s hard to be positive, given Oracle’s walled-garden culture.

[ Want more on Oracle’s OpenStack announcement? See Oracle Embraces OpenStack. ]

Oracle essentially ended OpenSolaris as an open-source project, leaving third-party derivatives of OpenSolaris (equivalent to those promulgated by Joyent and Nexenta) out within the cold, having to fork OpenSolaris to Illumos. Similarly, the open-source community’s loss of trust could be seen ultimately within the forking of MySQL into MariaDB over concerns about Oracle’s support and direction of the MySQL project. Google moved to MariaDB, and each of the major Linux distributions are switching to it to boot.

In reading Oracle’s press release, one gets the impression that Oracle is just bowing to the pressures it sees that you can buy and isn’t necessarily deeply committed to what makes OpenStack special: its collaborative and inclusive community.

Only time will let us know for certain.

Oracle’s product line support for OpenStack and the enterprise
Oracle announced an exhaustive list of goods it plans to support with OpenStack. It’s really too many to list here, however the most prominent and fascinating products mentioned were Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, and Oracle VM. 

For those not within the know, Oracle was challenging to work with in terms of virtualization.

During our deployment of the KT (née Korea Telecom) uCloud in 2010 and 2011, we discovered to our consternation that Oracle wouldn’t support the Oracle database software under Xen or XenServer. Instead, Oracle insisted on pushing OracleVM because the only supportable virtualization platform, which mainly means Oracle Linux to boot. (i feel in case you twist its arm, the corporate will support Oracle running in VMware ESX, but i feel there may be still pretty significant resistance.)

Obviously, some of the pros and cons of using OpenStack is that because it is a wide-open platform, multi-hypervisor deployments are quite possible. i’m typically bearish on multi-hypervisor as i suspect it adds complexity and risk to production deployments; however, there are some clear cases that make multi-hypervisor compelling:

• Bare metal support.
• Hyper-V support to attenuate Microsoft licensing costs.
• Oracle VM support to minimize Oracle licensing and support costs.
• Containers for either bare metal, next-generation platform support, or both.

So, although Oracle has a perhaps overly ambitious lineup of support for OpenStack, if it simply shows up and makes Oracle Linux and Oracle VM work with OpenStack, that may be a net win for both the OpenStack ecosystem and Oracle.

It’s hard to not have a certain quantity of pessimism about Oracle’s announcement. However, I’m hopeful that this signals an understanding of the market realities and that its intentions are inside the right place. We’re going to know fairly soon how serious it really is in keeping with code contributions to OpenStack, which might be tracked at Stackalytics. (Thus far, there are zero commits from Oracle and only two from Nimbula, Oracle’s recent cloud software acquisition.)

Personally, I’m happy to peer Oracle join the party. It further validates the extent of interest in OpenStack from the enterprise and reinforces that we’re all building a platform for the long run.

Randy Bias is co-founder and CEO of cloud software supplier CloudScaling. He pioneered IaaS at GoGrid and is a founding member and current board member of the OpenStack Foundation.

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