As companies migrate to cloud environments, they are demanding solutions that integrate features from multiple cloud platforms. Business software maker Oracle has responded to this growing need with their latest product, the Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure.
As explained in a briefing announcing its general availability on Thursday, July 21, the service will help companies utilizing both Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Microsoft Azure, set up a seamless and multi-cloud environment.
A multi-cloud environment possesses more than one cloud deployment of the same type from more than one cloud vendor. For instance, an environment that has two public clouds or two private clouds qualifies as multi-cloud. Oracle released its first multi-cloud solution in 2019, when the company launched the OCI-Azure Interconnect that provides a low latency, private connection between these two public cloud platforms.
“One of the common pieces feedbacks we got [for OCI-Azure Interconnect] was, hey, we got what we were looking for when it comes to interconnection, performance, and reliability, but can you make it easier? Can you reduce the amount of work it takes to establish the interconnection and set it up?” Leo Leung, Oracle’s vice president of product management stated during the briefing.
This is where the Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure comes in. This service builds on Interconnect to make working with these two cloud platforms painless. It enables businesses to smoothly provision and manage their Oracle databases running on OCI using a familiar Azure Application Programming Interface (API) and console experience.
Even better, customers are not charged for using the Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure or for the underlying network interconnection, data egress, or data ingress between Azure and OCI. Customers only pay for the other Azure or Oracle services they consume, such as Azure Synapse or Oracle Autonomous Database.
In other words, by picking and choosing among the best of OCI and Azure database services, this new service allows companies to cost-effectively configure their cloud environments to their exact requirements.
This service was also made specifically to handle enterprise operations. lt can scale up to 31 petabyte data warehouses and 10 million+ SQL input/output operations per second. It has zero downtime due to the native Oracle RAC, which gives end-to-end protection of customer databases. To further address the issue of increased vulnerabilities due to having multiple cloud platforms, Leung assured that this multi-cloud solution was built to both Oracle and Microsoft security standards.
Steve Zivanic, Oralce’s Global VP of Database and Autonomous Services, summed up during the briefing. “This is an issue that customers came to us and said we want the best of both clouds, but we want them to behave as one and that’s essentially what our engineering team with Microsoft’s did together. They delivered the experience, the power and capabilities of two clouds, the applications plus the database, but delivered as one.”
Yet Oracle’s improved multi-cloud solution is just the start. Liu and Zivanic noted that multi-cloud environments will become more common and could eventually benefit enterprises of all sizes, as it allows them to maximize the usability of the cloud.
Zivanic further hinted that multi-cloud will become standard across industries. “You’re going to see customers asking cloud providers for this type of multi-cloud experience. This is just the beginning of what customers want. Customers want cloud providers to collaborate.”
“So, this is the beginning of the context of where the multi-cloud deployments will look going forward and it’s all driven by customer demand,” Zivanic concluded.
The Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure was formally launched during the 2022 Microsoft Inspire conference held on July 19 to July 20.
