Oracle Database Service + Microsoft Azure Applications = Multi-Cloud

?By Jean S. Bozman

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Microsoft Azure — two public clouds with an overlapping customer set—announced a new managed service that connects applications running on Azure with Oracle databases running on OCI – and doing so over secure, high-speed, and low-latency interconnects.

?As announced on July 20, a new managed service allows customers to provision and manage Oracle databases running on OCI, using an Azure-native API and console. It was announced by Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, signaling the importance of this multi-cloud news.

?Named the Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure, this new service allows customers to provision, access and monitor enterprise-grade Oracle Database services in OCI, while using a familiar Azure look-and-feel customer experience.

Applications using the new service leverage low-latency interconnects to improve multi-cloud connectivity and performance; to eliminate data-transfer charges for ingress and egress; and to support multi-cloud use.

In all, there are 11 interconnects worldwide, providing regional cloud access in 2 milliseconds or less, in the Americas, in EMEA, in Asia/Pacific, and in Africa. Countries where these 11 interconnect portals are installed include Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, the United States, the U.K., India, Japan, and South Africa. There will be at least two availability zones (AZs) in each geographic region. More of these interconnects — using the same technology — are planned to be deployed worldwide.

Oracle said that 300 of its customers—many of them large enterprises—are already using these global interconnects in production workloads. Early customers include AT&T, Marriott International, and SGS, an international inspection and testing company based in Switzerland. Oracle and Microsoft began to deploy the interconnect links in 2019, as multi-cloud use cases began to emerge worldwide.

Going forward, the Oracle Database for Microsoft Azure service will likely be used by SMB companies as well. That’s because the Azure/Oracle Cloud interconnects support applications running Oracle Database in small-and-medium businesses (SMBs) that tap Microsoft Azure as a public cloud resource for their applications, analytics, and data.

?Impact on Multi-Cloud Customers

The move is significant as a pragmatic way to access data stored across cloud resources by the world’s two largest database providers. It allows customers the choice of where and how to deploy their data – and the ability to access it across the two clouds – Azure and OCI. The impact of the Azure/OCI links will transcend large enterprises, such as banks, insurance companies and large manufacturing companies. Rather, it is a new way for SMBs and MSPs to leverage both public clouds—Microsoft Azure and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure—to grow their business operations by leveraging multi-cloud capabilities.

The global interconnects provide a seamless way to connect Microsoft applications and analytics to Oracle databases, including the Oracle Autonomous Database and highly scalable Oracle Exadata Database services. The new solution allows customers to leverage Azure’s authorization, monitoring and management capabilities when they set up and run databases on OCI’s managed cloud service. ?By doing so, customers seek to reduce their DevOps costs and improve their time-to-revenue when deploying multi-cloud database and analytics workloads.

The new Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure will likely impact large enterprise customers first, because they already have multiple sites worldwide using both Azure services and Oracle databases. It will improve the usability for many customers—including enterprises and SMBs—by deepening the integration between Azure and OCI cloud services.

?Use Cases for Azure/Oracle Interconnects

Examples for immediate use-cases include workloads that leverage Microsoft Active Directory for identity management; Microsoft Power BI for data visualization; Oracle Autonomous Database and the Oracle databases running on scalable Oracle Exadata server and storage resources in OCI.

Another interesting use case will access Oracle RAC clustered databases that are running inside the Oracle Cloud—making those RAC clusters accessible to Azure application users. By using this approach, end-customers will not need to tune or customize access to the Oracle clustered databases. That could reduce programming time and development costs associated with multi-cloud analytics.

Summary

When viewed through the lens of the 1990s and early 2000s, it seemed unlikely that Microsoft and Oracle—two of the toughest competitors in the database world—would host a high-profile cooperation announcement making it easier, not harder, to access their company’s most valued software.

?That was then, and this is now.

Customers are seeing the utility of multi-cloud access for data and applications that have been deployed in specific locations around the world. For the largest companies, those wide-ranging deployments originated with mergers and acquisitions (M & A) activity as their business operations expanded within countries and regionally, worldwide. Many tapped international telecommunications services to reach into new markets worldwide.

For mid-range companies, the drive to tap multiple data resources stemmed from growth and expanding business models, over many years. Organic and inorganic growth led to inexorable expansion of successful businesses.

For the smallest firms, multi-cloud access is attractive, because they aim to compete more intensively with larger firms. However, moving to multi-cloud has often meant that SMBs must ask for help from global consulting companies. SMBs do not have enough skilled staffers inside their company to tackle the monitoring and management of highly distributed business applications.

Now, as scenarios for multi-cloud computing evolve, more companies are seeing the value of applying cloud services and interconnects to make their end-to-end applications and data “work.” That will be the case, provided that security and regulatory compliance are applied to protect their corporate data when used with a new generation of multi-cloud, extensible, end-to-end applications.

The essence of business value has, indeed, changed in the 2020s—centering on speed of deployment, performance, security, application availability and ease-of-use for analytics to support better business outcomes. To enable real-time business models, cloud-service partnerships that once seemed unlikely will become more widely accepted over time—although customers will closely study the performance and security that they are gaining from multi-cloud operations.

With this cooperative agreement, Oracle and Microsoft have shown that this can be done by providing a multi-cloud integration model that benefits their mutual customers.

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