Oracle’s conversion to the cloud may have been a belated one, but the company’s making up for lost time, promising this week to open a new cloud region every 23 days for more than a year. The 15-month campaign will mean Oracle has a healthy 36 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regions by the end of 2020.
(AWS is generally available in 22 regions around the world; Azure leads with 50; Google Cloud Platform has 20; all are expanding fast).
The outcome, as Oracle’s CTO told a cheering audience at its OpenWorld conference in San Francisco this week, will be that “this time next year, we’ll have more cloud regions than AWS”. (Few Oracle or AWS events are complete without a pointed dig at each company’s respective favourite foil).
See also: “This is What Happens Larry…”
“This expansion includes regions in new countries and dual, geographically separated regions in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, U.K., EU, Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and new government regions in the U.K. and Israel”, Oracle said in one of a flurry of announcements at the event.
Among the company’s other reveals: a new free Cloud service tier, featuring a limited version of its paid Autonomous Database; an AI-powered digital voice assistant; and an “autonomous Linux” OS: “The first autonomous operating system in the cloud to deliver automated patching, updates, and tuning without human intervention.”
(This is based on a preconfigured Oracle Linux image; automated daily package updates; enhanced OS parameter tuning and OS diagnostics gathering.)
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure : “Unlike Other Cloud Providers…”
“Enterprise customers worldwide require geographically distributed regions for true business continuity, disaster protection and regional compliance requirements. Multiple availability domains within a region will not address this issue,” said Don Johnson, EVP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
“Unlike other cloud providers, Oracle is committed to offer a second region for disaster recovery in every country where we launch Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services, a strategy that’s aligned with our customers’ needs.”
Oracle Cloud has opened 12 regions in the past year and currently operates 16 regions globally—11 commercial and five government.
Oracle is also expanding its interconnection with Microsoft Azure, first announced in June 2019. (London is among the two zones in which joint Oracle and Microsoft customers can move applications to the cloud down a single pipe).
In the next few quarters, it is globally expanding the interconnect to U.S. West, Asia and Europe, the company said.
See also: Microsoft and Oracle Link Clouds, Bring Oracle Databases to Azure
