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Bob Quillin sold his company StackEngine to Oracle in December 2015 and has been at Oracle ever since, helping to mature Oracle’s container strategy.
StackEngine was a container management startup building technology to enable container operations for enterprise-grade requirements. “What we had been focusing on after getting acquired was building out a container cloud service based on Docker,” Quillin told eWEEK.
The Oracle Container Cloud Service (CCS) officially launched at the Oracle OpenWorld event in 2016, based on technology originally built by StackEngine. Quillin explained that CCS was built with a proprietary orchestration approach with a focus on providing operational stability.
Moving toward a container and microservices model for enterprise applications often involves a degree of professional services and co-engineering with customers to get started. Quillin said Oracle now works very closely with customers in a variety of ways to help build, manage and deploy enterprise applications in container environments.
“We’re actually using Docker and Kubernetes to build our own cloud services, so we [Oracle] have a lot of experience building tools and utilities,” he said.
While StackEngine’s model represented an early approach to container management, Oracle is now evolving its Container Cloud Service to become more Kubernetes-native than what StackEngine had originally built. Oracle is now a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and has publicly committed to supporting Kubernetes.
“StackEngine was focused on a Docker path with Swarm,” Quillin said. “We’re now committed to Kubernetes; customers have spoken and the market has spoken on what they are looking for.”
Part of the attraction of Kubernetes for Oracle and its customers is the open-source community that helps to develop the technology. Rather than just being a consumer of open-source technology, Quillin said Oracle is committed to being an active participant in the Kubernetes and cloud-native open-source communities.
“We have a saying at Oracle about chopping wood and carrying water, which is all about earning our stripes and being engaged in the community and contributing,” he said. “It’s a new team, and we’re very much an open-source-oriented team.”
Watch the full video with Bob Quillin, vice president of the Oracle Container Group at Oracle, above.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.