A lot of development work we do for Oracle Linux is focused around Oracle Cloud. Work with the infrastructure team to provide the best OS for them, work on new features that can help in various areas (NVMe, kvm, GPU, security, containers...) and so on. But we also put a lot of effort into making Oracle Linux run extremely well for customers on Oracle Cloud. Pre-built images which we try to make as efficient as possible and configured out of the box to just work seamlessly. For instance, a few weeks ago we added the Oracle Ksplice package to the base image and pre-configured them so that Ksplice works without any additional steps. Want to use it? Just type uptrack-upgrade. The latest kernel version is typically installed, latest fixes for drivers. Anything that every customer would have to do themselves we try to pre-emptively take care of.
Another aspect of running Oracle Linux in Oracle Cloud is providing the right packages and make it easy to get to them. We are working on a mirror of yum.oracle.com and the Oracle Container Registry inside the Oracle Cloud regions for super highspeed access to packages without having to go outside of the datacenters. And we are building packages that are not part of the base Oracle Linux but are certainly very useful and frequently asked for by customers. For instance, we released RPMs for Terraform with the Oracle Bare Metal cloud provider so that you don't have to manually download binaries, but just use a local pre-configured yum repo.
We also released fluentd and collectd packages here and here . Oracle Managed Cloud works with collectd for instance for its data collection to do analytics. While customers or developers can certainly go and download these packages elsewhere, it would require extra steps. We're just doing it to ensure that they're all in the same place. They're mirrored inside the datacenters, they're signed by our key, preconfigured yum.repo files, and all the dependencies have been verified to ensure we don't break anything when they are published. Of course all the source code is also available in the usual place. As we get more requests to add more packages these _developer, _preview and _developer_epel channels will get more content. The biggest focus area here will be developers, container services and providing all the packages to easily get going.
And remember, all this is included with every instance of Oracle Linux you run in Oracle Cloud, no additional charges. Oracle Ksplice, full support, everything we have is out of the box, included.