Cloud infrastructure giant Rackspace is welcoming a number of former Sun Microsystems employees this week. The employees came from Drizzle, an offshoot of open source database MySQL that aimed to create a “trimmed-down, faster version of the database system.”

Oracle closed its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems earlier this year, and Drizzle developer Jay Pipes wrote in a blog post that he and a few of his fellow colleagues soon found out that they wouldn’t have a job once Oracle took over the reins. During the EU investigation of the deal, rumors emerged that MySQL would be eliminated because of the competition the database poses to Oracle’s own database technology. Pipes writes:

Larry Ellison has gone on record that the whole “cloud thing” is faddish. I don’t know whether Larry understands that cloud computing and infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and database-as-a-service will eventually put his beloved Oracle cash cow in its place or not. I don’t know whether Oracle is planning on embracing the cloud environments which will continue to eat up the market share of more traditional in-house environments upon which their revenue streams depend. I really don’t.

But what I do know is that Rackspace is betting that providing these services is what the future of technology will be about.

Pipes and his Drizzle team have now migrated to Rackspace, where their products will be supported by the company’s strategic goals.