Oracle Jumps on the Docker Train

Over the weekend, Oracle scooped up StackEngine, a small Austin-based start-up that focuses on DevOps automation around Docker containers. Why is a minor Oracle acquisition of a company with only five employees important? It is the tech giant's first meaningful step toward imbuing its public cloud infrastructure with native application container support.

Oracle confirmed it signed and closed an agreement on Friday to acquire StackEngine. The total deal's value was not disclosed but SEC filing documents indicate the company paid $1.3 million for StackEngine employee stock options and equity—and that all of StackEngine's employees will be absorbed into Oracle's Public Cloud team.

Founded in 2014, StackEngine has raised a total of $4.5 million over two funding rounds. The start-up was focused on layering enterprise-grade management capabilities atop a Docker infrastructure, primarily rooted in automating the container deployment and scaling process to make developers' lives easier. The platform gives DevOps teams a control plane from which to allocate compute resources and more easily deploy containers to specific apps and user groups within a business. It also offers deeper IT features such as the ability to manage Docker images and a real-time Docker audit stream.

It's not yet clear exactly how Oracle will integrate StackEngine's technology, but the move is a more concrete step into containers for a company that has largely stood pat while Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and VMware have doubled down on either Docker or in-house container infrastructure over the past couple of years.

Oracle has made a few open-source contributions around enabling Docker support in Oracle Linux, and has worked to integrate the Docker Engine and some container image management capabilities. Those were largely measures to avoid falling behind, though, rather than proactively investing in the exploding space.

Containers and microservices architectures are becoming more and more a part of the fabric upon which enterprises build and manage cloud servers and virtualized infrastructure. Oracle is firmly entrenched in the database, server, and cloud application management space but, until now, has largely seemed content to let start-ups enter an enterprise Docker market in which Oracle could have had a huge leg up from the start. Bringing StackEngine into the fold may mean Oracle is finally starting to get with the program.