Where do you want your Oracle Autonomous Database? On Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)? Easy. But how about in Amazon Web Services (AWS)? Yes, with the brand-new Oracle Database@AWS, soon to be generally available. How about in Google? Yes, with Oracle Database@Google Cloud. That’s on top of Oracle Database@Azure, previously announced, and the new Oracle Dedicated Region25, which puts OCI right into your own data center.
Why is this important? Because we live in a multicloud world.
“We’re entering a new phase where services on different clouds work gracefully together,” said Larry Ellison, chairman and CTO of Oracle, at Oracle CloudWorld this week in Las Vegas. “The clouds are becoming open. They’re no longer walled gardens; customers have choices and will use multiple clouds together.”
Indeed, many organizations have tremendous amounts of data inside Oracle Databases and want to leverage those assets for applications and workloads inside AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. With these three partnerships, Oracle is helping enable a true multicloud strategy, whereby organizations can run workloads that span two or more clouds—but which they can license and manage as if it were a single cloud.
This allows businesses to maximize the value of their substantial investments in the Amazon, Google, and Microsoft clouds while running Oracle Database 23ai, and Oracle’s many other cloud services, against the same data without incurring data egress charges.
Oracle already lets organizations run Oracle services in the cloud, but what about running the cloud locally within their own data centers? Demonstrated at the Oracle CloudWorld conference in September 2024, the new Dedicated Region25 solution makes it easier than ever for customers to install their own dedicated OCI instances—as small as three racks—right in their own data centers and connected directly to their high performance networks.
“OCI supports customers with low latency and high scale requirements, and bringing the public cloud to them can really make a difference,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Development. “With Dedicated Region25, OCI is transforming the cloud industry by offering different, scale down options to give you the flexibility that you need.”
Read more on the Azure and Dedicated Region25 capabilities below. But first, let’s dig into the Amazon, Google, and Microsoft partnerships.
Announced at Oracle CloudWorld in September, Oracle Database@AWS lets customers access Oracle Autonomous Database 23ai on dedicated infrastructure while also using Oracle Exadata Database Service from within AWS. Amazon customers can access these and other Oracle services using a single unified experience for administration, support, and billing.
More importantly, data is connected, so that Oracle Autonomous Database works seamlessly with AWS’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Analytics Services, and Amazon Bedrock AI/ML services. In other words, AWS workloads can now use Oracle Autonomous Database without needing to export to OCI. All your data and applications for those workloads stay inside the Amazon cloud.
“Some customers want to move their Oracle databases, and the applications that go with them, from on-premises into AWS,” said Ellison. “They would like to move the application intact, use the Oracle database, and have the application and database running in AWS.”
That’s what Oracle did: “We took the Exadata cluster hardware, our RDMA network, all the latest Oracle database software—actually took the OCI data center—and embedded it right into an AWS data center,” said Ellison.
A key benefit of this partnership: Oracle and Amazon are offering a zero-ETL integration that also includes Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to encompass database backups and restores and disaster recovery planning.
On stage at CloudWorld, Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, said that AWS customers often run their core workloads on Oracle and were trying to figure out get them to run within AWS, in a low-latency way, with all their Amazon and Oracle applications. Now, for admins used to the Amazon cloud, they can procure Oracle’s services from within the AWS Management Console or command-line tools.
“They wanted it to feel like a native AWS service, and so there’s lot of integrations,” said Garman. “You can get support both from AWS and from Oracle. We think this dramatically expands the market—it’s what customers have asked for.”
Early customers working with Oracle Database@AWS include Best Buy, State Street, Vodafone, and Fidelity Investments. The Oracle Database@AWS service will be available in preview later in 2024 and be generally available in 2025, at first in a single region, and then quickly launching to other regions based on demand.
With Oracle Database@Google Cloud, applications running in Google Cloud Platform will get direct access to Oracle Database services running on OCI and deployed in Google data centers.
In addition, customers can now take advantage of Oracle’s database and Exadata technology to develop new workloads that are truly multicloud in scope. At first, this capability will be available in four Google Cloud regions across Europe and the United States: US East (Ashburn, Virginia), US West (Salt Lake City), UK South (London), and Germany Central (Frankfurt).
Plans are to expand Oracle Database@Google Cloud to 12 additional regions, using the regions where Oracle Interconnect for Google Cloud is already available. Those include Madrid, Sydney, Melbourne, Mumbai, Tokyo, Singapore, and Sao Paulo. Announced in July 2024, the Oracle Interconnect for Google Cloud is a dedicated, private interconnection service that helps customers apply familiar tools to support workloads running across both clouds without incurring data egress charges.
“Customers can now combine Oracle databases and applications running on OCI with Google Cloud’s industry-leading infrastructure, data, and AI capabilities,” said Andi Gutmans, vice president and general manager of databases for Google Cloud. “This enables enterprises to more rapidly migrate to the cloud and accelerate their transformative generative AI journeys with services such as Vertex AI.”
More good news for Google Cloud users—along with AWS and Azure customers, of course: These new offerings cover a wide range of Oracle offerings, including Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Exadata Database Service, and Oracle HeatWave MySQL.
“OCI supports customers with low latency and high scale requirements, and bringing the public cloud to them can really make a difference.”
Artificial intelligence is on the menu as well, because organizations can take advantage of Google Cloud’s Vertex AI service, Gemini foundation models, and the integrated AI capabilities in Oracle Database 23ai.
“For the first time, the AI and converged database capabilities of Oracle Database 23ai as well as all the automation and tools of Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Exadata Database Service are fully integrated with Google Cloud,” said Karan Batta, senior vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “This new service combines all of the benefits of OCI database services with Google Cloud services for a seamless multicloud experience, which was unthinkable in the cloud space just a few years ago.”
Think of this is allowing enterprises to operate two clouds as one, with feature and pricing parity to running in OCI. That means if you’re familiar with operating within Google Cloud, you can use that as the base to deploy Oracle services, with native integration with Google Cloud’s console, APIs, monitoring, and operations.
Customers can license these Oracle services on Google Cloud Marketplace, so that they buy Oracle Database services using their existing Google Cloud commitments. At the same time, customers can use their Oracle license benefits, such as Bring Your Own License (BYOL) and Oracle Support Rewards.
Oracle’s announcement with Google follows its December 2023 unveiling of Oracle Database@Azure, letting customers build new cloud native services using technologies such as Azure Kubernetes and Azure OpenAI Service, tightly integrated with Oracle Database. Customers can also migrate their Oracle Databases to Azure to simplify workloads and management, while taking advantage of the same performance, availability, and security as when using OCI.
Similar to the way the new Oracle Database@Google Cloud services can be licensed and managed from Google Cloud Marketplace, customers can license Oracle Database services through the Azure Marketplace, using Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitments (MACCs), and get a single combined bill.
Since the Oracle Database@Azure release late last year, numerous customers have adopted the offering. There are currently six regions for Oracle Database@Azure, with more coming online soon.
Want the cloud in your own data center? Oracle Dedicated Region25 lets organizations run Oracle Cloud services on-premises. And not just a subset of services—customers get Oracle’s full public cloud infrastructure; fully managed cloud services, including AI and analytics; and Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Exadata, and Oracle Fusion SaaS applications.
Among the benefits: Customers retain control of the hardware, software, and networks running their data centers, which can be essential for satisfying the most stringent security, connectivity, data residency, and other requirements, said Magouyrk.
“Dedicated region is a long-term investment for us to achieve a goal of putting an entire cloud on three racks,” said Magouyrk. “We had to update all elements, system, compute, the network, storage, and every part of the software stack. The ability to scale the footprint down allows us to deliver cloud in locations that were not previously possible at Oracle.”
Dedicated Region25 goes small where a public cloud goes large: A basic configuration, assembled with prebuilt components, fits inside three highly secure racks, each with a new locking mechanism, and integrated telemetry on each physical access point. All traffic between them is fully encrypted—and you can even separate the three racks within your data center, making it easy to place them physically.
Need to grow? No problem. You can expand to six racks, and then 12, then to 64, and continuing up to thousands of racks, depending on workload requirements. In fact, the Dedicated Region25 system allows customers to build an OCI instance that’s as large as one of Oracle’s own public cloud regions, but entirely within your own facilities, and entirely within your own network.
Dedicated Region25 will be available in a number of different physical configurations that can be sized for the intended workloads and assembled and delivered more quickly than ever before by Oracle, generally in a matter of weeks. This includes a more customizable number of compute cores, memory, networking bandwidth, and storage capacity, all with a new unified, converged architecture that supports all OCI services, Oracle Database, Fusion Applications, and a whole lot more.
In short, Dedicated Region25 gives organizations the full benefit of the Oracle public cloud inside their own data centers and connected exclusively to their network, power, cooling, and physical security infrastructures.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure doesn’t encompass only the Oracle public cloud. OCI’s AI and analytics services, as well as Oracle Autonomous Database, HeatWave MySQL, and Fusion Applications, are now totally at home in Amazon Web Services, the Google Cloud, in Microsoft Azure, and in the locked-tight confines of customers’ own data centers with Dedicated Region25.
Future Product Disclaimer
The preceding is intended to outline our general product direction. It is intended for information purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, timing, and pricing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products may change and remains at the sole discretion of Oracle Corporation.
Forward-Looking Statements Disclaimer
Statements in this article relating to Oracle’s future plans, expectations, beliefs, and intentions are “forward-looking statements” and are subject to material risks and uncertainties. Many factors could affect Oracle’s current expectations and actual results, and could cause actual results to differ materially. A discussion of such factors and other risks that affect Oracle’s business is contained in Oracle’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, including Oracle’s most recent reports on Form 10-K and Form 10-Q under the heading “Risk Factors.” These filings are available on the SEC’s website or on Oracle’s website at http://www.oracle.com/investor. All information in this article is current as of September 11, 2024 and Oracle undertakes no duty to update any statement in light of new information or future events
See how you can turbocharge your multicloud strategy by leveraging Google Cloud and OCI together, taking advantage of the best of both worlds.
Build new cloud native apps using Azure services, such as Azure Kubernetes and Azure OpenAI Service, with Oracle Autonomous Database.