Oracle is making significant moves to drive Oracle Solaris into cloud environments. After including a full distribution of OpenStack in Oracle Solaris 11.2 last year, the company today announced plans to integrate Docker into Oracle Solaris. The integration will allow enterprise customers to use the Docker open platform to easily distribute applications built and deployed in Oracle Solaris Zones, Oracle Solaris’ built-in virtualization technology. Oracle also plans to make software including Oracle WebLogic Server available for development and testing as Docker images.

Solaris pioneered container technology more than 10 years ago as Solaris Containers. Now known as Oracle Solaris Zones, a majority of Oracle Solaris customers use the technology for its industry-leading scalability and efficiency, as well as comprehensive resource and security isolation, which is critical for enterprise class environments. Oracle Solaris Zones are also widely recognized as license boundaries for most enterprise applications, allowing customers to significantly lower costs.

“Oracle Solaris Zones make moving to hybrid cloud environments secure and simple with no virtualization overhead or expense,” said Markus Flierl, vice president, Oracle Solaris Core Technology. “Today’s announcement really gives developers the best of both worlds — access to Oracle Solaris’ enterprise class security, resource isolation and superior analytics with the ability to easily create containers in dev/test, production and cloud environments. Integrating Docker into Oracle Solaris will make that even easier and will help customers benefit from highly integrated compute on premises and in the cloud.”

“Docker welcomes Oracle Solaris to the Docker community. Integrating Docker with Oracle Solaris Zones will bring a mature and proven container technology to Docker environments running in enterprise class clouds,” said Nick Stinemates, vice president of Business Development & Technical Alliances for Docker.

“As enterprises have increasingly adopted cloud technologies over the last few years, collaboration between development and operations has become a business imperative,” said Laurent Lachal, Senior Analyst, Infrastructure Solutions, Ovum. “Oracle’s move to integrate Docker into Oracle Solaris is a win-win proposition. Cloud developers can take advantage of Oracle Solaris’ full OpenStack distribution, built-in security capabilities and easily migrate workloads across a broader choice of platforms.”

Oracle also recently released the beta for Oracle Solaris 11.3, which includes several new Oracle Solaris Zones features such as secure live migration, live reconfiguration and verified boot for Oracle Solaris Kernel Zones. Download the Oracle Solaris 11.3 beta from Oracle Technology Network.