Oracle Solaris may not see any significant upgrades these days, but Oracle will still continue to support the Suns Microsystems-developed OS for years to come. Oracle will not close the door on Solaris, instead, the company is moving Oracle Solaris to be on the continuous delivery model.
Oracle Will Not Kill Solaris, Instead Upgraded
The news came after Oracle unceremoniously dumped its planned Solaris 12 release. According to The Register, the enterprise software giant has dribbled out a little more information about the future of the Sun-built OS Solaris, after last week's announcement of an Oracle roadmap that showed a planned version 12 with version "11.next" and then throwing a lot information about the company's plan to adopt a continuous delivery of OS updates.
However, Oracle has not provided much information about when this continuous delivery approach would start and what it would mean for companies and organizations in terms of update or cost. As mentioned earlier on Oracle Blog, Solaris will be moving to a continuous delivery model using more frequent updates to deliver the latest features faster.
Additionally, Oracle has also promised new features and functionality, which will be delivered in Solaris through dot releases instead of more disruptive major releases. By moving to continuous delivery model, customers will have a seamless update experience to better fit their move to a more agile deployment models, Oracle added in a blog post.
Oracle first get their hands on the Solaris technology after the company's 2010 acquisition of Sun Microsystems, the company behind Solaris OS and other key computing technologies, including Java and the Network File System (NFS). In addition to the Solaris moves, Oracle also announced that Solaris 11 will have the Solaris Premier support until January 2031, while an Extended Support will continue until January 2034.
Oracle May Have A Hard Time Competing In The Cloud
Oracle plans to integrate SPARC and Solaris into its Oracle Cloud platform. In fact, the enterprise software giant has already reaffirmed that Solaris will still be supported on SPARC Model 300 IaaS cloud and as a guest OS in the Oracle Compute Cloud Service. For some, this means only on thing- Oracle is now getting serious about the cloud.
According to Fortune, Oracle is a latecomer to the world of public cloud, where Amazon Web Services has overwhelmingly dominated the space since 2006. In an AWS cloud model, Amazon aggregates masses of IT hardware and resources which include servers, storage, and networking gears and offers those IT resources to customers.
Analysts said it still hard for Oracle to match the vast amount of resources that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have been throwing into infrastructure cloud services annually.
But Oracle is hoping that it can still close the gap. In an interview with Fortune, Oracle's Peter Magnusson made a bold statement that his company could easily field enough cloud data center capacity to deal with 99.9 percent of the Fortune 500-listed companies' workloads it needed to handle.
Just last week, Oracle announced plans to bring three more new cloud data center online, and with plans for more.
