Multicloud is changing the way modern teams run their workloads: with real choice and real control. In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham welcome Senior Principal OCI Instructor Sergio Castro, who explains how Oracle has partnered with Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS to bring Oracle Database directly inside their data centers, unlocking sub-millisecond latency and new levels of flexibility. They discuss how organizations can seamlessly migrate from on-premises or between clouds with minimal disruption, take advantage of best-in-class cloud services, and enhance business continuity. Oracle Database@AWS Architect Professional: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-databaseaws-architect-professional/155574 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Anna Hulkower, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. ------------------------------------------------------------ Episode Transcript:

00:00

Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started!

00:26

Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Lois Houston, Director of Communications and Adoption with Customer Success Services, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services.

Nikita: Hi everyone! We're kicking off a new season of the podcast today, this time on Oracle Database@AWS. But before we fully dive into that, we've got Sergio Castro with us to introduce multicloud and talk about some of its use cases. Sergio, who you may have heard on the podcast before, is a Senior Principal OCI Instructor with Oracle University.

01:02

Lois: Hi Sergio! Thanks for joining us today. We've spoken a lot about multicloud before, but we couldn't possibly discuss Oracle Database@AWS without another quick intro to multicloud. So, for anyone who doesn't already know, what is multicloud? And could you also talk about what Oracle is doing in this space?

Sergio: It is the use of several Cloud providers to deliver an IT service.

Basically, a multi-cloud strategy allows organizations to distribute their workloads across multiple Cloud platforms and providers. This will help aiding the flexibility when picking the right tool for each job.

Basically, by selecting the best Cloud Service, IT architects can take advantage of each provider's strengths, including custom hardware, software, and service capabilities. And Oracle is a pioneer in multi-cloud.

We have partnerships with Azure, Google Cloud, AWS, and we've been doing multi-cloud since 2019, including Oracle Interconnect for Azure and Oracle Interconnect for Google Cloud.

Our multi-cloud products is the Oracle Database Service at Azure, at Google Cloud, and at AWS. Here we have our database inside the data centers of these Cloud Service providers. And multi-cloud can be complemented by resources that you have on-premises, providing you with a hybrid Cloud model.

And our public Cloud offerings are not limited to the commercial realm. Multi-cloud is beginning to be available also in the government realm. You can now find Oracle Interconnect for Azure in the US government realm.

We also have government realm offerings in the UK and in the European Union. And of course, dedicated Cloud. If you're going to be involving on-premises, you can also have all the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources behind your firewall, behind your routers with dedicated Cloud.

So the offers from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are really exceptional. It offers you great flexibility and choice. And the choice is yours. You select the platform for your Oracle Cloud solutions.

03:39

Nikita: You've already mentioned a few of them, but could you talk about the various benefits of multicloud?

Sergio: A solid multi-cloud approach enables organizations to leverage the unique strengths and offerings of various Cloud service providers. By not being limited to a single vendor's capabilities or policies, businesses can adapt quickly to changing environments, deploy workloads where they fit best, and rapidly integrate new solutions as market demands evolve.

Relying on a single Cloud vendor can make it challenging and costly to migrate workloads or switch providers if businesses needs change. Multi-cloud strategies mitigate this risk by distributing applications and data across multiple platforms, making technology transition smoother and giving organizations greater bargaining power.

Now, diminishing single points of failure at the Cloud service provider level is great, because distributing systems and data across multiple clouds can definitely reduce dependence on a single provider or region.

This increased geographic diversity improves resilience and provides a more robust backup and recovery option, helping to ensure business continuity in the event of a disaster or even an outage. With access to a range of pricing models and service levels from different providers, organizations can allocate workloads based on cost effectiveness.

This best fit approach encourages cost savings by enabling the selection of the most economical provider for each workload. And this facilitates continuous cost optimization efforts. For example, OCI provides significantly lower data egress charges, this in comparison to our competitors.

Multicloud management empowers organizations to place their workloads in the environments where they perform the best. By distributing workloads based on latency, processing power, or data proximity, businesses can realize performance improvements and achieve higher availability for their critical services.

Now regarding best of breed, each Cloud provider brings unique innovations and specialized services to the market. With a multi-cloud approach, organizations can tailor solutions to meet specific business needs.

Operating across multiple Cloud platforms means access to a wider array of data centers worldwide. This extended reach supports expansion into new markets, improves local performance for users, and helps satisfy data sovereignty requirements in diverse jurisdictions. And speaking about jurisdictions, this flexibility helps meet industry standards and regional data protection laws more effectively.

06:50

Nikita: You mentioned that Oracle's multicloud journey started in 2019 with Azure. What was that early phase like?

Sergio: The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure multi-cloud offering started with the Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, where we connect FastConnect, our digital circuit, to the equivalent Express Route, the digital circuit of Microsoft Azure.

Basically FastConnect, it is used typically for extending the OCI services into on-premises. In this case, it is extending these services into another Cloud Service provider, Microsoft Azure or various applications.

07:29

Lois: And then we moved on to Oracle Database Service for Azure, right?

Sergio: It's very similar to what we have right now, the Oracle Database Service at Azure, except that back then, the interface was on OCI.

Basically on OCI, we had a console that resembled Azure, but all the services were still running on OCI. Now, the difference with Oracle Database Service at Azure is that we extended Oracle Cloud Infrastructure into the Azure data centers.

So Oracle Database at Azure is a child site in the Microsoft Azure data centers. Basically we are placing our hardware in Azure data centers. And this gives us a very good latency, sub-one millisecond latency.

08:24

Lois: What about Oracle's multicloud services with Google and Amazon Web Services?

Sergio: Oracle Interconnect org and Oracle Database app are available for Google Cloud. We do have a service called Oracle Interconnect or Google Cloud, similar to the Azure one.

And we also have the Oracle Database inside the Google Cloud data centers operating as a child site. And back in 2024 during Oracle Cloud World, we announced Oracle Database@AWS.

This product is now available in two AWS regions. In a similar way, we have the Oracle Database inside the AWS data center with sub-one millisecond latency. We are currently in two data centers, but we have brought plans for being available in over 20 plan regions between Oracle Cloud and Amazon Web Services.

09:32

Nikita: Sergio, how do the capabilities of Oracle Database multicloud help enterprises modernize?

Sergio: Oracle Database multi-cloud capabilities help enterprise modernize, adopting a Gen AI strategy, obviously, using the Oracle database to bring Oracle's powerful AI to business data. When you move to multi-cloud environments, you have a playground for you to test and run your workloads and then go into productions with your choice of services on the Oracle Exadata.

And reducing risk, it's very easy to move to cloud and gain Oracle maximum availability architecture benefits. And by moving into a multi-cloud environment, you guarantee that you're going to be lowering your cost because you're going to be selecting the best of breed of the services that the Cloud Service provider can offer.

Now, with the Oracle Database on multi-cloud environments, you're able to port your Oracle Database knowledge that you have from on-premises to a single cloud provider to a multi-cloud environment. It is the same solution, the same Oracle Database capabilities available everywhere-- on-premises, on your private cloud, on a single cloud provider, or on a multi-cloud environment.

Having the same capabilities make it very easy to migrate from on-premises or to migrate from one cloud service provider to the other. Oracle Database multi-cloud solutions really offer the best of both worlds. So a choice of services directly from hyperscaler marketplace and the vendor's cloud portal.

11:21

Lois: And when you say "hyperscalers," who exactly are you referring to?

Sergio: These hyperscalers, we're talking about OCI, we're talking about Azure, we're talking about Google cloud, we're talking about AWS. Having the Oracle Database inside the Cloud data centers, regardless of who the hyperscaler provider is, guarantees low latency from your application into your database.

But Oracle Database is not the only product. We also offer Oracle Interconnect for Azure and GCP. So if you want to go beyond Oracle Database@Cloud Service provider, or if you're looking to going into a region where the service is not available yet, you can leverage the Oracle Interconnect for Azure or Google Cloud platform.

Basically, this service interconnects the Cloud Service providers. We have a partnership and selected regions where we interconnect with either Azure or Google Cloud platform.

12:25

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12:45

Nikita: Welcome back! Sergio, could you tell us about some key Oracle Database multicloud use cases?

Sergio: Move to cloud. Lift and shift from on-premises to Cloud. Lift and shift from one Cloud Service provider to the other, and consolidate your database on Exadata.

This will guarantee all the tools that you need for building innovative applications, bringing artificial intelligence to your business data, on the Oracle powerful AI suite, and combine Database AI with hyperscaler services and frameworks. Remember, the best of breed from the Cloud Service provider of your choice.

And this will allow you to reduce complexity and cost. Now according to knowledge is not the only thing. You can also lift and ship without refactoring your data, reducing migration times, complexity, and costs with the Oracle Database Exadata and maximum availability architecture.

13:47

Nikita: What are the key differentiators and benefits of moving Oracle Database workloads to the cloud?

Sergio: Extreme performance. Accelerate your database workloads with scalability, scale infrastructure, and consumption, and extreme cost optimization. But that's not all.

You also get extreme availability with the Oracle maximum availability architecture, extreme resiliency, making sure that you're always running with high availability and disaster recovery protection and extreme simplicity. So you can use all your Oracle Database and Exadata capabilities.

Build innovative applications with Cloud-First capabilities. These are Cloud native capabilities that are going to enable you to innovate for all your applications. And having a unified multi-cloud environment reduce complexity and cost because you can leverage your Exadata infrastructure with share licenses, low administration with database lifecycle automation, and purchase through your hyperscaler marketplace.

So you can only have one vendor running all billing, even if you're leveraging multi-cloud solutions. And you can leverage your Oracle investments with bring-your-own-license and earn up to 33% towards Oracle tech license.

Reduce administration by up to 65% with the Autonomous self-driving database. Only pay consumption for actual usage with online scaling, Autonomous Database, elastic pools, and per second billing. And enjoy advanced features at no added cost, like using the built-in AI vector search.

15:31

Lois: Can you give us a real-world example of a company using Oracle Database@AWS?

Sergio: Fidelity Investments rely on Oracle Database@AWS. They were one of the very first customers to leverage the best of both worlds, in this case, the offering from the AWS hyperscale applications and the Oracle Database Exadata Cloud service inside AWS.

Specifically, Fidelity uses this integration to make it easier to move some of its database workloads to AWS, combining the reliability and security of AWS with the critical enterprise software provided by Oracle.

16:17

Lois: Thank you, Sergio, for joining us on the podcast! To learn more about what we discussed today, head over to mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Database@AWS Architect Professional course. Join us next week when we dive deep into what Oracle Database@AWS is all about. Until then, this is Lois Houston…

Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off!

16:43

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