The wave of hype around Docker continues to rise, and Oracle wants a piece of the action. The Redwood Shores, California, giant has made images of its own Linux distribution available on Docker Hub, the public registry for tools and components developers can use as building blocks for their Docker-enabled applications.
Docker has created a lot of excitement among developers around its open source application container technology. As a recent survey funded by Canonical found, however, while there’s a lot of interest in Docker, there’s not a whole lot of adoption taking place. After all, the company has officially been around for less than one year.
Linux is extremely popular. More than one-third of the world’s websites run on Linux-powered servers, for example, but Oracle Linux is not a very popular distribution. The most widely used distro on the web is Debian, followed by Ubuntu, CentOS, and Red Hat, in that order, according to W3Techs, which conducts web technology surveys.
Ubuntu, the Linux distribution by Canonical, is also the most downloaded image on Docker Hub. CentOS is second.
While not widely deployed in production, Docker, has garnered a lot of support from giant IT vendors and service providers. Google has a private Docker container registry service on its cloud platform; Amazon Web Services has a Docker container management service; Microsoft Azure supports Docker, and Windows has a command line interface for Docker.
Oracle Linux is not the giant’s only presence on Docker Hub. A MySQL image has been available on the registry before. Oracle owns MySQL, even though, like Linux, it’s open source.
“With Oracle Linux and MySQL images available on the Docker Hub Registry, users will be able to quickly create and publish custom Docker containers that layer applications on top of Oracle Linux and MySQL, which is a great time-saver for both independent software vendors and IT departments,” Wim Coekaertz, senior vice president for Linux and virtualization engineering at Oracle, said in a statement.
