Continuing its efforts to expand container efforts, Oracle has brought three new open source utilities. The new developments are aimed to help users improve the security of application containers.
The tools published by Oracle, called Smith secure container builder, Crashcart container debugging tool and Railcar container runtime, are designed to help developers improve the security and performance of application containers.
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 alongside 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 runtime used in Docker containers. The container runtime is written using Rust programming language.
Rust as a mid-way
Rust offers the 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 an 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 announced 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. Furthermore, the tool can access the filesystem of the container to identify the issues.
All the three open source developments are likely to give an edge to Oracle’s OpenStack platform over time. Moreover, the company is expected to leverage the utilities to receive more developer contributions.
