Oracle released its Verrazzano enterprise container platform earlier this month. The open-source, subscription-based DevOps platform runs on top of Kubernetes and allows users to deploy, manage, and secure container applications on any Kubernetes cluster where Oracle’s container platform is installed.

“We do see Kubernetes as the orchestration engine of choice. But that by itself isn't really enough to solve all these problems,” Oracle product manager David Cabelus told SDxCentral in an interview. 

Verrazzano’s main goals are to enable customers to retain their investment in existing applications, ease the adoption of modern application development architectures, and run apps in any cloud environment users choose.

“Our strategy to achieve this was really to start with a familiar set of open-source technologies” that wouldn’t require users to learn entirely new systems, Cabelus said. “We're trying to make it as familiar and consistent as possible.” 

Istio, Rancher, and Keycloak are projects integrated into Verrazzano, along with Oracle-authored open-source custom resources and controllers. 

Verrazzano is comparable to Red Hat’s OpenShift platform, though Cabelus said Oracle has “done things a little bit differently.” 

Oracle’s platform focuses on alleviating common customer pain points and providing a positive user experience, Cabelus said. Verrazzano tech support is also available for subscribers.

Another differentiating factor is Verrazzano’s multicloud design, according to Cabelus. Verrazzano’s “cloud agnostic” model provides users a central location from which they can manage workloads in different places. 

“It's almost like a neutralizing platform,” Cabelus explained. “It's the same no matter where I'm going to deploy. I'm going to use the same APIs and the same tooling. I'm going to observe the same way.”

Oracle has a history of working with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), though Cabelus said there is no active plan to donate Verrazzano to the CNCF. 

“It's definitely a conversation piece,” Cabelus noted. “I'm not really sure what the pluses and minuses would be in that. We'll look and see what the cost is to make it happen.”

Verrazzano is an open-source platform, but Cabelus said Oracle does not fork any of the projects it incorporates into Verrazzano. Rather, Oracle takes the latest stable version and applies fixes from the community when necessary. 

“We don't want to have to fork versions. It doesn't really help anybody,” Cabelus said. “We do actually encourage more community input, although a lot of these [fixes] have been led by Oracle.”