Oracle Cloud myth-busting

(the article below is my own personal opinion and doesn't necessarily reflect that of my employer yada yada)

I was having my Saturday morning coffee going through the internal briefing documents and announcements in preparation for Oracle's largest annual cloud event, CloudWorld, nodding along and digging into the details of some very cool announcements to come.

Then it hit me how little of this cool new stuff I would have ever heard of unless I actually worked at Oracle. I say that as someone who has worked at the world's largest hyperscalers, including AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud, over the last 15 years. I'm deeply entrenched in the public cloud industry, working on the "inside", and I pay more attention to the competitive space than most due to the nature of my work. Still, I had a lot of misconceptions that took an open mind to reevaluate and realize how dismissive I had been of Oracle's place in the cloud space.

Back to my morning coffee, and the announcements. There's some really cool stuff there for the people "in the know", but most people, even industry people, will never look because there isn't a trigger for them to reevaluate their perception of Oracle. I started to jot down my own past misconceptions, and things I've heard from customers and partners over these past couple of months. I wanted to both reflect, and also share with you, some of the myths and misconceptions I've dealt with. Even if you only take away one thing from this article, it would be to keep an open mind and always be learning. You have to have a growth mindset working with the extremely fast paced nature of cloud and technology in general.

Myth 1: Oracle is a database company, and by extension, Oracle Cloud is database as a service

This is probably the most common one, even with highly technical people. Much like many people think of either Office or Windows when you say Microsoft, many instinctively think database when they hear Oracle. If you go and look at Microsoft's latest earnings report you will see that their Intelligent Cloud (the Azure stuff) business is actually bigger than both Office and Windows at this point. While Oracle is the king of relational databases, it has a humongous share in business and industry cloud applications (SaaS offerings of things like CRM/HRM/Financials/SCM etc), owns things like JAVA, powers a large share of retail (MICROS POS etc), is the underlying cloud infrastructure of companies like Zoom, Fedex and Toyota. The idea of Oracle being a database only company is factually outdated by decades at this point.

There's another element of this myth that has made it extra persistent, and that's the fact that Oracle's first endeavor into managed infrastructure and cloud services centered around managed database offerings. We're now on generation 2, rethinking and improving a lot of concepts that came in the first wave of hyperscaler offerings. OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructre) is the gen 2 cloud offering from Oracle that is a comprehensive IaaS/PaaS platform.

So, fact: Oracle Cloud offers everything from IaaS, through PaaS and all the way up to SaaS.

Myth 2: Oracle technology is proprietary

Much like myth 1 above, myth 2 stems from how things used to be decades ago. Yes, licensed software tend to be proprietary by nature, whether it be Microsoft Office or Oracle Databases.

However, OCI (the IaaS/PaaS cloud offering) was built with open standards, open source and platform mobility and multi-cloud in mind from the start. It's really easy to say things are open, but I like to give concrete examples to show how this thinking and strategy has permeated the platform, and ends up giving it an edge against most of its competitors. Most people using cloud treat infrastructure as code, and you need a way to do that. So the various platforms came up with things like Azure's ARM templates or AWS's cloudformation. While the concepts are great, they are platform specific implementations and solutions to that problem. What the industry did in the end was move towards things like Hashicorp's Terraform, an open source solution that works cross-platform (multi- or hybrid cloud). Great. What about OCI? Well, OCI is terraform based. That's what we do. That's the industry standard, it's open source, it makes sense. Why reinvent the wheel and do something proprietary? That's old Oracle think.

While I think terraform might be the best example of prioritizing open source and standards, I could go on and on with other examples like Big Data Service being a managed offering of HDSF/Hadoop/Spark etc, or the managed Kubernetes offering OKE and how Oracle very actively contributes back up stack and is a board member of CNCF etc.

I will even go one further on this myth and say, Oracle is trying to push multi-cloud and customer choice where none of the competitors do. MySQL Heatwave is a breakthrough in mixing transactions, analytics and ML in a single database. It's so good that many customers moved to OCI because they wanted to use it. What did Oracle do? Well, they decided offer it on AWS as well to give customers choice and flexibility. I don't remember seeing AWS's RedShift, or Google Spanner, on anything but AWS and GCP. Who was the proprietary one again? We want OCI to be the best platform by being open, not by being closed.

Fact: OCI uses open standards and open source extensively, many times eclipsing competitors in this area

Myth 3: Oracle is expensive

To some degree I believe this might be the same myth as myth 1, stemming from people's experience buying Oracle DB as licensed software. This is probably the biggest 180° in terms of myth vs reality.

One of the biggest reasons OCI is growing faster than its competitors YoY is the fact that price/performance is superior. For example, egress is pretty much one factor cheaper than its competitors. For example, 8x8 lowered their cost by 80% moving from AWS to OCI. First 10TB each month is free, after that it's one single price, $0.0085/GB. Azure equivalent is $0.08/GB (although their pricing is more complex, so hard to make a 1:1 comparison), and AWS comes in at $0.09 (and this is also quite complicated, so assuming EC2 egress from Ohio as an example).

Did you notice how there's one more "0" in the OCI pricing? Yeah, it's that much cheaper. I could go on and on about how OCI FastConnect is unmetered compared to AWS DirectConnect or Azure ExpressRoute, but I think just showing egress rates paints the picture.

Wrap up

I feel like I could probably write a book on the topic of Oracle myths at this point, but this article was more focused on the idea that everyone should approach new things with an open mind. Sometimes you might be surprised; much like I was. "It's how much cheaper?", "It runs Zoom and Fedex?", "the Oracle default is open source?". My own personal perception changed so far that I ended up joining Oracle Cloud team with the belief that it will be strongest growing hyperscaler for the next few years. You might not go that far, but hopefully you will at least have a look at all the exciting things that will be announced at CloudWorld next week, and hopefully I will see you there.