Oracle Cloud to Offer the Bitnami Application Library
The Bitnami Application Library is coming to the Oracle Cloud.
Oracle Cloud users will be able to launch Bitnami applications with a single click through the Bitnami Cloud Launchpad or the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. Bitnami announced the service at Oracle’s OpenWorld conference, held this week in San Francisco.
Bitnami offers 130 popular server applications in its catalog, along with deployment services that can be run locally, in a virtual machine, or a public cloud. Bitnami offers assurance that applications come from a trusted source, are patched, secured and updated; it takes care of compiling and configuring the applications and all of their dependencies such as third-party libraries, language runtimes and databases.
Bitnami is no stranger to commercial cloud deployments, with Oracle Cloud joining Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean and others in joining Bitnami.
Still, the Oracle adoption is a significant one for Bitnami.
“We believe the Oracle platform appeals to customers who have typical enterprise concerns and might prioritize those differently than people focused on Google or Amazon,” said David Dennis, Bitnami vice president of marketing.
The Bitnami catalog includes infrastructure stacks such as WAMP, MAMP, LAMP and Ruby, as well as collaboration tools like WordPress, Drupal, Ghost, and Roller. A few months ago it announced Docker images stocked with individual developer components such as NGINX, PHP, Ruby in SQL and noSQL varieties.
Some Bitnami stacks
In September, Bitnami announced expansion of its library to include commercially-licensed server software, in addition to the open source packages.
“Some of the early platforms we supported like AWS were very much open source … As the Bitnami audience has grown pretty rapidly, we’ve been asked by folks ‘What about support for hybrid clouds?’” said Simon Bennett, Bitnami vice president of products.
“VMware’s vCloud Air is a good example,” Bennett said. VMware “thinks of Bitnami as an extension of its existing infrastructure. The problems they’re trying to solve are a little different, the way they look at capabilities like having the application live on a network that extends my on-premise infrastructure, it’s quite different. Things like the ability to do [high availability] and failover.”
CenturyLink is among its customers who offer the Bitnami app catalog privately, Bennett said.
The images launched on the Oracle Cloud are built on top of the Oracle Linux distribution; they do not include Oracle’s proprietary databases.
“The part that’s unspoken is that Oracle has its own services that run on its cloud. One of the things we believe people will want to do is say, ‘What if I want to use one of Oracle’s PaaS services, but need to hook that up with other things that don’t exist within the Oracle PaaS universe?’ A lot of those applications and bits of infrastructure do exist in the Bitnami application catalog,” Dennis said.
Oracle product development president Thomas Kurian said all aspects of Oracle’s cloud business are growing and that 70 percent of its cloud customers have never bought software from Oracle before, so it’s bringing in lots of new customers.
Kurian also argued Amazon won’t be able to deliver on the migration service that it’s promising, responding to AWS’s recently launched service called AWS Database Migration Service, which helps companies move their data to its Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), from Oracle or other in-house databases. It reported that more than 1,000 customers signed up in the first week.
The AWS Marketplace has become a $1 billion revenue stream for Amazon, and Oracle was among the software vendors that became part of the AWS Test Drive program, which allows customers to try out software before buying it.
In July, Oracle joined the Open Container Initiative, the group working on industry-wide container standards, and has just updated its Oracle OpenStack platform with containers in mind.
Nonetheless, Oracle seriously trails the major public cloud vendors in the cloud market.
“Oracle didn’t take this seriously enough at first and given how fast these others are moving, catching them from behind will be nearly impossible,” analyst Rob Enderle said.
“Given they lock their customers in pretty well and can often force their technology to win as a result, all [Oracle] really need[s] to be is adequate and for many, if not most, this coupled with not having to constantly deal with cross-vendor interoperability issues should be enough to hold much of their base,” he said.
“But it won’t be a good platform for new customer acquisition unless they move far faster than they are or find a way to make an acquisition that moves them into some recognized form of market leadership. So think of its strategy as more of a customer-retention than customer-acquisition strategy at least for now,” Enderle said.
One-hour cloud demos of the apps are available at no cost.
DigitalOcean, Docker and VMware are sponsors of The New Stack.
Feature image via Pixabay.
