Oracle today introduced support for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in a move to give customers a wider variety of OS options and address projected public cloud services and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) spending increases.

Gartner analysts predict global public cloud end-user spending will reach almost $600 billion this year, and IaaS will experience the most growth (29.8%) in end-user spending. Oracle argued these figures are calling for broader cloud provider and operating system choices for enterprise customers.

With the partnership, OCI is now an "authorized, certified, and supported" cloud platform for RHEL, Oracle VP Leo Leung told SDxCentral. This allows joint customers to migrate critical workloads that need Red Hat's operating system to Oracle's cloud "and run them seamlessly with collaborative support" from both vendors.

Leung claimed more than 90% of the Fortune 500 companies are using RHEL in production environments, rendering this integration particularly suited for business critical workloads of any size, running across Oracle's public cloud, in hybrid environments, Dedicated Regions, or Oracle Alloy.

He added that enterprises should feel confident that workloads based on Red Hat's operating system "will run the same in OCI as they have in other environments." And with "OCI’s flexible virtual machine (VM) shapes, which scale in single CPU and 1-[gigabyte] per CPU increments, customers will get exactly the performance they need for their mission critical workloads at a competitive cost."

Oracle also plans to integrate other aspects of Red Hat's hybrid cloud portfolio with OCI. Leung noted this operating system certification is "the first step of our partnership," and the two vendors' customers "are already expressing interest in additional integrations."

Other operating systems currently supported by OCI include Oracle Linux, Microsoft Windows Server, Ubuntu Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, CentOS, Oracle Solaris, and FreeBSD. These options are available either from Oracle Console or the vendor's cloud marketplace.