Oracle and AWS have entered into a strategic relationship, announced this week at the Oracle CloudWorld conference in Las Vegas, in which Oracle’s cloud infrastructure will be deployed and run in AWS datacenters. This partnership, modeled after Oracle’s existing relationships with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud or GCP, will see Oracle Autonomous Database and Exadata infrastructure physically reside in and integrate with the entirety of the AWS portfolio of technologies and services.
This announcement is significant for enterprise IT organizations that consume both Oracle and AWS services—meaning virtually every large enterprise. However, it may be even bigger for the industry as whole because it indicates a move toward native multicloud integration to better meet customers’ needs. Let’s dig into why this partnership between OCI and AWS is such a big deal for customers and the industry.
The Multicloud World Requires True Multicloud
We live in a multicloud world. This is so obvious—almost a cliché—that it is easy to lose sight of what this actually means. Unless, of course, you happen to be an IT pro responsible for connecting applications and data for the business, or an application developer tasked with building a cloud app fueled by data that resides everywhere.
In many ways, however, the multicloud that we’ve seen to date has meant nothing more than consuming services from multiple cloud providers. But shouldn’t it also mean cloud-to-cloud connectivity that is performant, secure and frictionless? Unfortunately, that really hasn’t been the case in practical terms. More than that, the cost of moving data from cloud to cloud can be prohibitive. In some cases, even moving data from region to region—within the same cloud!—can become prohibitively expensive.
Some CSPs have addressed this through dedicated interconnects. In the case of OCI, Oracle has already developed partnerships with Azure (which I covered here) and Google Cloud (which I wrote about here) to enable low-latency, highly secure connections between the cloud environments. This allows customers to move data from cloud to cloud and from app to database fast and without those dreaded egress costs.
Oracle Database@CSP Is Native Multicloud
The concept of Oracle Database@CSP took has taken this multi-cloud enablement to new levels. Under this model, Oracle deploys its Exadata infrastructure and Autonomous Database in another CSP’s datacenter. This means that the database is fully connected to the CSP network and natively accessible by the portfolio of services in that datacenter.
In this model, customers buy, consume and manage Oracle database services through the console of the host CSP. It is effectively a first-party service that a consumer can spin up like any other service, so it is very simple. However, the Oracle Cloud team still maintains the Oracle environment.
Over the past few years, OCI has partnered with Azure and GCP to deliver this Database@CSP model (Oracle Database@Google Cloud was just made generally available at the time of this writing). In the case of Azure, we know that the partnership was delivered for enterprise customers that standardized on Oracle and Microsoft many years ago. While the GCP flavor of this was just recently released, I have no doubt this partnership will see similar success. That said, the GCP partnership differs from the Azure one because the GCP customer profile is different. While Azure is very popular with enterprise IT, GCP tends to be more attractive to smaller organizations. GCP also has a rich history in areas of advanced computing such as AI.
The one missing piece of the Database@CSP strategy has been the biggest CSP of all: AWS. While this may seem a little surprising on its surface, it really isn’t. AWS is the largest CSP on the planet by a considerable margin and is pretty strong in its opinions about having third-party infrastructure in its datacenters—especially infrastructure from a competitor, and even more so from a competitor as aggressive as Oracle.
But here’s the deal: the largest CSP and the largest database vendor are sure to have many customers in common. Those customers want to easily and cost-effectively marry AWS’s goodness with all the data in their Oracle environments. To take one example, imagine seamlessly feeding the AWS Bedrock development platform for generative AI with decades of your enterprise data residing in Oracle. This is what customers want, and this is what AWS and Oracle can uniquely deliver—but only through a thoughtfully constructed partnership.
Oracle Database@AWS — What Is It?
Oracle Database@AWS is precisely what was described previously for Azure and GCP, but tailored to AWS. Oracle’s Autonomous Database and Exadata infrastructure are deployed in AWS data centers and made available for AWS customers to consume just like they would any other AWS service. From selection to billing to monitoring, the Oracle database environment looks like every other AWS service from the customer’s perspective.
Once stood up, Database@AWS also integrates directly with other AWS offerings—as in the Bedrock example already given. Companies (mostly enterprises) that have invested in Oracle for their database needs will find this integration especially compelling, as they will be able to make that data available to AWS services, once again in a highly secure and low-latency environment. If a customer has technical issues with their instance, AWS handles first-level support. If the problem isn’t resolved, AWS and Oracle work together to resolve it.
I believe that enterprise IT organizations will find it compelling to be able to remove the extract-transform-load process when using tools such as AWS Analytics. This kind of streamlining is the very definition of speed and simplicity in our data-driven era. Likewise, the ability to connect AWS Bedrock with all that rich data sitting in the Oracle Database immediately makes GenAI in the enterprise easier, faster and more secure.
How OCI Works In AWS
It’s important to restate that this setup is not simply Oracle’s database running in AWS as a service. Rather, this is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure residing and running in AWS datacenters, with Autonomous Database and supporting services (networking etc.) along for the ride—a cloud region running inside a cloud region. Like with Azure and GCP, Oracle’s play with AWS is completely differentiated from any other vendor. No other cloud provider deploys a region in another cloud provider’s datacenter.
This is a crucial detail to tease out because it speaks to a couple of things. First and foremost, it delivers guarantees for performance, reliability and resiliency that are aligned with Oracle’s standards. This is not to imply that AWS is a less reliable cloud. However, Exadata and the Autonomous Database infrastructure are designed and tuned specifically for the Oracle Database environment and, as such, deliver better performance than third-party hardware ever could.
The second thing to note is that these OCIs are building plumbing between clouds. Oracle Database@Azure and Oracle Database@GCP are OCI regions. These OCI regions can distribute data among themselves, effectively enabling organizations to move data easily from one cloud to another—with, let me remind you once again, low latency and strong security.
What Does This Partnership Mean For Oracle?
This is a significant win for Oracle for several reasons. First, it allows the company to meet its customers on their own terms. For any enterprise that made AWS its primary CSP years ago and now wants to migrate its Oracle environment, this partnership finally enables it to happen. AWS has tons of enterprise applications and Oracle has tons of enterprise data; as previously mentioned, this move allows customers to bring all that data to all those applications.
This partnership is also important for Oracle because it enables the company to drive toward market expansion of its database platform. Many existing Oracle customers are large enterprises that have been using the platform for decades—very many of them since the 20th century. Some of those cited in the Oracle press release are Vodafone, Fidelity and State Street Bank. While these sizeable organizations are on the leading edge of technology, Oracle is trying to educate and bring a new generation of companies and developers into its community as well. The partnership with AWS (like the existing GCP partnership) should help Oracle drive this market expansion strategy.
Why Would AWS Do This?
If one were to draw a Venn diagram of AWS and Oracle customers, its intersection would be large. Given that Oracle seems to be in virtually every Fortune 1000 company, it is fair to say that AWS’s biggest customers are also overwhelmingly Oracle customers. This partnership enables AWS to better meet the needs of these customers that want to take advantage of an Oracle Autonomous Database but consume it through AWS—and the budget already allotted to AWS.
Not just incidentally, I believe this could also be a good defensive tack for AWS. Azure has established a strong “enterprise cloud” position thanks to Microsoft’s legacy in on-prem enterprise IT environments. This new partnership with Oracle enables AWS to maintain parity with Microsoft from an enterprise serviceability perspective.
Oracle Is Playing The Long Game
Oracle has been quite aggressive with OCI since it launched its Gen 2 back in 2018—and the company has seen considerable success with it. In fact, in its latest earnings, Oracle saw its cloud revenue grow 21% year over year and its IaaS revenue grow a staggering 45% YoY. That is partly tied to the company’s footprint in the enterprise.
Oracle has been building what I call a native multicloud offering for some time. It started with building dedicated interconnects with Azure and Google and has expanded to deploying its cloud within the CSPs to deliver performance, security and value on customers’ terms. This kind of cooperation makes today’s version of Oracle hardly recognizable as the company I used to write checks to when I was in enterprise IT leadership.
How will this all play out? Will Oracle succeed in turning the next generation of app developers and businesses into customers? Will AWS, Azure and Google aggressively position their Oracle offering?
Time will tell. It’s very early in the game, and I expect the first surge of business will come from existing customers migrating Oracle databases to the cloud. The real work begins after that, with Oracle’s outreach efforts wrapped in awareness and education campaigns.
One thing is for certain: Oracle has positioned itself well.
