Automation is the growing trend in the IT industry. The aim is to remove the manual interference from the repetitive tasks. Oracle has taken another step into the automation world by launching Oracle Autonomous Linux that is surely going to benefit the IoT and CLoud Computing industry.
Oracle Autonomous Linux: Less Human Intervention, More Automation
On Monday, Larry Ellison, the legendary co-founder of Oracle, took the stage at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. He announced a new product: the world’s first autonomous linux. This is the second step in Oracle’s march towards a second-generation cloud. The first step was the Autonomous Database released two years ago.
The biggest feature that Oracle Autonomous Linux is reduced maintenance costs. According to Oracle’s site, Autonomous Linux “uses advanced machine learning and autonomous capabilities to deliver unprecedented cost savings, security, and availability and frees up critical IT resources to tackle more strategic initiatives”.
Autonomous Linux can install updates and patches without human interference. These automatic updates include patches for the “Linux kernel and key user space libraries”. “This requires no downtime along with protection from both external attacks and malicious internal users.” They can also take place while the system is running to reduce downtime. Autonomous Linux also handles scaling automatically to ensure that all computing needs are handled.
Ellison highlighted how the new autonomous would improve security. He mentioned in particular how Capitol One data breach occurred because of a bad configuration. He said “One simple rule to prevent data theft: Put your data in an autonomous system. No human error, no data loss. That’s the big difference between us and AWS.”
Interestingly, Oracle is also aiming this new product to compete with IBM. Ellison said, “If you’re paying IBM, you can stop.” All Red Hat applications should be able to run on Autonomous Linux without modification. Interestingly, Oracle Linux is built from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
It does not appear that Oracle Autonomous Linux will be available for anyone outside of the enterprise market.
Thoughts on Oracle Autonomous Linux
Oracle is a big player in the cloud services market. This new Linux product will allow it to compete with IBM. It will be interesting how IBM responds, especially since they have a new influx of open-source smarts from Red Hat.
If you look at the number, things are not looking good for either IBM or Oracle. The majority of the cloud business is controlled by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. IBM and Oracle are somewhere behind them. IBM bought Red Hat in an attempt to gain ground. This new Autonomous Cloud initiative is Oracle’s move for dominance (or at least attempt to gain a larger market share). It will be interesting how many companies buy into Oracle’s system to become more secure in the wild west of the internet.
I have to mention this quickly: when I first read about the announcement, all I could this was “Well, we are one step closer to Skynet.” If we let technology think for itself, we are just inviting an android apocalypse. If you’ll encuse me, I’m going to buy some canned goods.
Are you interested in Oracle’s new product? Do you it will help them win the cloud wars? Let us know in the comments below.
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