World’s first autonomous operating system?

Oracle has marked a major milestone in the company’s autonomous strategy with the availability of Oracle Autonomous Linux. Oracle Autonomous Linux, along with the new Oracle OS Management Service, is the first and only autonomous operating environment that eliminates complexity and human error to deliver unprecedented cost savings, security, and availability for customers.

Keeping systems patched and secure is one of the biggest ongoing challenges faced by IT today. Tasks can be tedious and error prone, and extremely difficult to manage in large-scale cloud environments. With Oracle Autonomous Linux, customers can rely on autonomous capabilities to help ensure their systems are secure and highly available to help prevent cyberattacks.

“Oracle Autonomous Linux builds on Oracle’s proven history of delivering Linux with extreme performance, reliability, and security to run the most demanding enterprise applications,” said Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president of operating systems and virtualization engineering, Oracle. “Today we are taking the next step in our autonomous strategy with Oracle Autonomous Linux, providing a rich set of capabilities to help our customers significantly improve reliability and protect their systems from cyberthreats.”  

Introducing Oracle OS Management Service

Along with Oracle Autonomous Linux, Oracle introduced Oracle OS Management Service, a highly available Oracle Cloud Infrastructure component that delivers control and visibility over systems whether they run Autonomous Linux, Linux, or Windows. Combined with resource governance policies, OS Management Service, via the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure console or APIs, also enables users to automate capabilities that will execute common management tasks for Linux systems, including patch and package management, security and compliance reporting, and configuration management. It can be further automated with other Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services like auto-scaling as workloads need to grow or shrink to meet elastic demand.

Oracle Autonomous Linux, in conjunction with Oracle OS Management Service, uses advanced machine learning and autonomous capabilities to deliver unprecedented cost savings, security, and availability and frees up critical IT resources to tackle more strategic initiatives.

• Eliminate manual OS management—World’s first autonomous operating system in the cloud to deliver automated patching, updates, and tuning without human intervention. Based on a preconfigured Oracle Linux image; automated daily package updates; enhanced OS parameter tuning and OS diagnostics gathering.
• Deliver automatic, in-depth protection at all levels—100 percent hands-off automatic security updates daily to the Linux kernel and key user space libraries. This requires no downtime along with protection from both external attacks and malicious internal users. Known Exploit Detection provides automated alerts if anyone attempts to exploit a vulnerability that has been patched by Oracle.
• Provide always-on availability—Includes automated patching and upgrades while the system is running, eliminating unnecessary downtime for users and the system.

Oracle Autonomous Linux and Oracle OS Management Services are included with Oracle Premier Support at no extra charge with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure compute services. Combined with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s other cost advantages, most Linux workload customers can expect to have 30-50 percent TCO savings versus both on-premise and other cloud vendors over five years.

“Adding autonomous capabilities to the operating system layer, with future plans to expand beyond infrastructure software, goes straight after the OpEx challenges nearly all customers face today,” said Al Gillen, Group VP, Software Development and Open Source, IDC. “This capability effectively turns Oracle Linux into a service, freeing customers to focus their IT resources on application and user experience, where they can deliver true competitive differentiation.”