UPDATED 19:00 EDT / MAY 26 2020

INFRA

Oracle’s open-source alter ego behind some of its most popular products

Open-source innovation may not be the words evoked by a legacy technology company such as Oracle, a company turning 43 years old next month. But the fact is that — like many companies — Oracle’s paid products and services are actually loaded with ingredients from open-source communities, including Linux, to which it is also a contributor.

This circular ecosystem of contributing and borrowing back enables some of the versatility and cross-environment compatibility in the company’s latest database and hybrid-cloud offerings.

“Our primary goal is to provide services and products to customers,” said Wim Coekaerts (pictured), senior vice president of software development at Oracle Corp. “The open-source part is sort of embedded in the development methodology, but that’s not something we sell or market separately. … So in some cases, it’s not well understood.”

In fact, when you add up all the developers inside of Oracle that work with open-source projects — contributing, testing, and providing fixes — the number reaches about 1,000, according to Coekaerts. The use of certain technologies on the company’s end in development, as well as on the customer’s end, enables a seamless, glitch-free experience, he added.

Coekaerts joined Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation. They discussed Oracle’s history with the Linux open-source community and the company’s latest efforts in database-as-a-service and cloud-on-prem interoperability. (* Disclosure below.)

Oracle is Linux; Linux is Oracle

Oracle initially became involved in Linux to make Oracle products that ran on the Linux operating system work better. However, none of its contributions are proprietary — they are open and available to all in the Linux community.

“The only way to be able to manage a Linux distribution and be a Linux vendor is to live in that ecosystem. Otherwise, the cost of maintaining your own fork, so to speak, is very high and it doesn’t really solve problems,” Coekaerts said. 

The use of Linux across Oracle’s portfolio, and as the underlying OS for its products and services, enhances end users’ experience, Coekaerts explained. For example, the company trains machine-learning algorithms on massive amounts of data that goes through hundreds of thousands of servers that make up its Oracle Cloud. Since Oracle Cloud runs on the Oracle Linux distro, this allows it to transfer some of this data wealth to its on-premises customers.

“We get lots of data, and so for us to figure out which algorithms work well in terms of how can we do network optimizations, how can we discover anomalies on the storage side, and deal with it and so forth … if we can get the data, the learning and the training done in our cloud directly, then when we provide that service also to people running Oracle Linux on-premises,” he explained. 

The alternative — point solutions that analyze the relatively small amount of data in a customer’s data center — provides inferior algorithm training and less accurate results, according to Coekaerts.

Smoothing path from on-prem to cloud

Oracle Autonomous Database uses ML to automate many routine DB management tasks. It has become extremely popular with customers, who may try it as a cloud service at first. Oracle can transfer it to hybrid customers’ on-prem environments without friction largely because the underlying operating systems are the same in both versions.

“We want to provide services and products that act similarly on-premises as well as the cloud. What you have today, for the most part, is one world that’s on-prem, and then the cloud world is completely different. And that is a big barrier to moving. And so we want to reduce that. You can run the same operating system local as well as cloud, you can get the same functionality, and then that helps the transition,” Coekaerts said. 

When its contributions improve both the larger Linux community and its own products, a circular flow of innovation develops that helps everyone that uses Linux, according to Coekaerts. “It’s not so much about making my own world better and having Linux be better and Ksplice and so forth, which is important, but that becoming part of the bigger picture — that’s the exciting part,” he concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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