LOS ANGELES – Oracle is building on its support for Kubernetes by integrating the technology into some of its platforms and by joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which houses the container orchestration technology.

The integration work includes the launch of Kubernetes on Oracle Linux and the open sourcing of its Terraform Kubernetes installer for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. At a high level, both are targeted at simplifying the deployment and management of Kubernetes at scale.

The integration of Kubernetes on Oracle Linux can support deployment and management in public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises. It was also developed as an extension of Oracle’s work with Docker, allowing for a simplified installation model for developers.

Mike Lehmann, VP of product management at Oracle, said the company over the past 12 months realized Docker has become a de facto standard in terms of deploying microservice applications; and that Kubernetes has become the standard for deploying and managing Docker at scale.

“That common substrate of Docker and Kubernetes provides enterprises and operations folks with a common skill set to run at scale,” Lehmann said.

By open sourcing its Kubernetes Terraform template, Lehmann said the company is looking to ease installing, running, and managing Kubernetes-based container applications. It’s also attempting to build on enterprises' and service providers' desire to avoid vendor lock-in concerns.

“The risk of lock-in is significantly reduced by adopting common open source platforms and infrastructure,” Lehmann said. “We are much aligned with that, and our customers are looking for that.”

Lehmann also said Oracle plans to build a business case around professional services that take advantage of the company’s cloud and market history.

“We differentiate on quality of service (QoS), security, and performance,” Lehmann said. “And by having this cloud-neutral substrate of Docker and Kubernetes, it gives a lot more confidence that they are choosing a solution that reduces lock-in and provides a clear path of support.”

Oracle in late May threw engineering support behind Kubernetes and sidled up with CoreOS to integrate that company’s Container Linux platform into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

“We were new at that time,” Lehmann explained. “We knew we needed to earn our stripes in handling issues and inserting code back into the community.”

Oracle also joined CNCF as a platinum member, bringing yet another of the market’s largest cloud providers into the rapidly expanding open source organization. Oracle has been participating in the organization as a technical member.

Lehmann said CNCF has become a central focus point for open source and cloud-neutral technology for the container space, which are areas Oracle wants to help foster.

“We think with the emergence of CNCF as a body, the industry has come together and worked together in defining these standards,” Lehmann said of the move. “We saw this as a natural next step in what we are doing with cloud neutral.”

CNCF currently hosts 10 projects, including Kubernetes for container orchestration; Prometheus for monitoring; Open Tracing for application flow monitoring; Fluentd for logging; Linkerd for service mesh; gRPC for remote procedure calls; CoreDNS for service discovery; Containerd and Rkt for container runtimes; and CNI for container native networking.

Over the past several weeks, CNCF has attracted both Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) into its ranks. The two joined already established cloud giants Google and IBM in the open source group.

Dan Kohn, director of CNCF, said the additions bolster the organization’s ability to impact change in the market.

“This really just shows that companies are reacting positively to what we are trying to accomplish,” Kohn said.