Oracle releases three open source container solutions

Continuing its efforts to expand its container offerings, Oracle has brought out three

new open source utilities. The new developments are to help users improve the

security of application containers.

The tools published by Oracle, which include the Smith Secure Container Builder, the Crashcart container debugging tool and the Railcar container runtime are designed to help developers improve the security and performance of application containers.

The open source Smith project is designed to help developers build secure application containers. Oracle had to change the container build process to be comfortable with using containers in production. 

Therefore, the company developed a method to run containers while improving the stability and security of their environment. “We have run into a number of operational issues with conventional container build processes. Smith is a tool that solves these issues by making

container builds more consistent and secure,” said Vish Abrams, architect of cloud development, Amazon.

In addition to the Smith project, Railcar has been developed by Oracle as an alternative to existing container runtimes including runc used in Docker containers, which is written using the Rust programming language.

Rust offers performance and security benefits like never before. Also, Rust support enables Railcar to be compliant with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) runtime specification.

Abrams believes Rust is sitting at the intersection of C and Go languages —

offering memory safety and higher-level primitives without sacrificing low-level

control over threading. “It is a great choice for container utilities, and we hope

to see the Rust community and the container community collaborate more in the

future,” he added.

The last tool launched by Oracle is Crashcart. The debugging tool is designed

to improve the performance of container applications. It is capable of identifying

the operational issues with the application container and suggesting the fix.

Besides, the tool can access the file system of the container to identify issues.

All three open source launches are likely to give an edge to Oracle’s

OpenStack platform over time