At the Open Source Summit, held in Los Angeles, USA, it was announced that Oracle has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a Platinum member. Oracle has also released two technologies for installing Kubernetes on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: "Kubernetes on Oracle Linux", an integration of Kubernetes into the Oracle Container Service; and an open source HashiCorp Terraform Kubernetes Installer for the Oracle Bare Metal Cloud. This news follows from the July release of three open source container tools by Oracle, which included a Rust-based alternative container runtime that implements the OCI-runtime specification
The CNCF is the home of "cloud native" projects such as Kubernetes, Prometheus and containerd, and their stated mission is to create and drive the adoption of a new computing paradigm that is optimized for modern distributed systems environments capable of scaling to tens of thousands of self healing multi-tenant nodes. Oracle joins the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and IBM as a Platinum member. Jon Mittelhauser, Oracle Vice President Container Native Engineering, has joined CNCF’s Governing Board.
On the Oracle Developer blog, Bob Quillin, VP Developer Relations, discussed the motivation for Oracle joining the CNCF:
This is a logical next step for Oracle as our customers are seeking an open, cloud-neutral, and community-driven container native technology stack that avoids cloud lock-in and allows them to run in a true hybrid mode - the same stack in the cloud - any cloud - as they run on premise.
CNCF shares Oracle’s commitment to open, cloud-neutral, and community-driven container native technology and is the leading hub for this community effort.
In addition to joining the CNCF, Oracle has also released two new suites of tooling for installing and configuring Kubernetes on the Oracle Cloud platform. Oracle Linux now includes Kubernetes as part of Oracle Container Services. This installation option is fully tested on Oracle Linux 7 and includes additional tools (such as kubeadm-setup.sh) developed at Oracle to ease configuration and deployment of a Kubernetes cluster. This installation method can be used for any environment on Oracle Linux, including public and private cloud and on-premise environments. Oracle Linux is freely available to download from the Oracle YUM repositories. Oracle Linux Premier Support is included free when deployed in Oracle bare metal cloud.
The second installation option is provided as a HashiCorp Terraform Kubernetes Installer, which consists of a set of Terraform modules and a base configuration for provisioning and configuring highly available Kubernetes clusters within Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) - including both VM and bare metal-based machines. The installation deploys network, compute, and load balancing integrations with Virtual Cloud Network (VCN), and also configures subnets and load balancing for the etcd and Kubernetes master clusters.
HashiCorp Terraform was chosen to install and configure Kubernetes on OCI for the following reasons:
- Terraform is becoming an extremely common way to orchestrate cloud infrastructure
- Terraform manages state, which is helpful, for example, for easily adding or removing nodes to a Kubernetes cluster
- The existing Terraform Provider for OCI provides an existing powerful abstraction for managing OCI infrastructure that can be leveraged and build upon
The Terraform installer configuration allows the Kubernetes master and worker node VM or bare metal types and sizes to be configured, and also the placement across the underlying Availability Domains (ADs) to be specified. The nodes are labeled intelligently, for example with the AD, to support Kubernetes multi-zone deployments so that the Kubernetes scheduler can spread pods across ADs for increased resilience.
The roadmap for the Terraform OCI Kubernetes Installer includes Kubernetes persistent storage integration and Load Balancer integration (for exposed services). The Oracle Developer Blog states that Oracle is "excited to see the requests and contributions that come in from the community to make this template even better". Issues or a pull requests can be submitted via Oracle’s Github repository, and developers are encouraged to read the CONTRIBUTING file for additional instructions.
Additional information on the announcement of Oracle joining the CNCF, and the associated release of Kubernetes installation tooling, can be found on the Oracle Developer Blog.
