Oracle takes the wraps off world’s first autonomous operating system

Oracle has trumped its Autonomous Database concept by unveiling the world's first fully autonomous operating system, taking heavy aim at rivals Amazon and IBM in the process.

Dubbed Oracle Autonomous Linux, the new OS is available immediately and follows on the self-management and self-securing path as the database that the tech giant launched back in 2017 to great fanfare.

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"Our version of Linux, which we have been working on for almost 20 years, is now autonomous. It is the first and the only autonomous OS in the world. And it's live," Ellison told delegates during his opening keynote at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco today.

"It's a highly available system designed for the cloud. It patches itself while it's running. You discover a vulnerability we fix it. There's no downtime, no delay. We fix it while it's running.

"It drives itself. There's nothing to do because it drives itself. It does all of this stuff automatically. You can concentrate on building systems that are related to your biz rather than worrying about the underlying plumbing. When you use Oracle autonomous OS in the cloud, the price is just right. It's free. So, if you're paying IBM, you can stop!"

The idea behind both the autonomous database and OS is to eliminate the room for human error and, in doing so, make organisations' large-scale cloud environments far more secure.

"Autonomous systems eliminate human labour. And, when you eliminate human error, you eliminator pilot error. If you eliminate pilot error on a database, you eliminate data theft. And that as far as I know is the only way you can ever eliminate data theft," Ellison added.

Citing the Capital One data breach, Ellison alluded to the fact it wouldn't have been possible using its technologies, saying: "With Oracle Autonomous Database, it's not possible for customers to configure there are no pilots to make errors."

He added: "In AWS' cloud if you make an error and it leaves a catastrophic data loss that's on you... With Oracle Autonomous Database, the system is responsible for preventing data loss, not you.

"Put your data in an autonomous system. There's no human labour, no human error, no data loss. That's a big difference between us and AWS."

Oracle's latest move will resonate with organisations looking to solve their OpEx challenges, according to Al Gilles, group vice president of software development and open source at analyst firm 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," he said.