Oracle boosts multi-cloud support for AWS and Red Hat OpenShift

• Oracle is bringing MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse to AWS and supporting Red Hat OpenShift on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

• The news follows last week’s announcement of support for Oracle Autonomous Database on Microsoft Azure

• Big Red, long a cloud laggard, is seeing increasing momentum in the cloud

Oracle kicked off its annual big OpenWorld customer and partner conference this week by expanding its multi-cloud portfolio, bringing its MySQL Heatwave Lakehouse database to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and adding support for Red Hat OpenShift on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

“We’re making it easier for customers to run OCI and our services in different ways, at different locations, with different operating models,” Leo Leung, Oracle VP products and strategy, told Silverlinings. “It’s critical for us to support not only our own technologies, but all kinds of third parties — even if we compete sometimes in different parts of the market.”

MySQL HeatWave is Oracle’s database that combines transaction processing and real-time analytics, so enterprises can both run their business and get insights for decision support without moving large amounts of data between different repositories. HeatWave’s capabilities save enterprises on the cost and security liability of moving data between applications.

HeatWave Lakehouse, introduced last year, extends HeatWave’s capabilities to data stored outside the database, including CSV and Parquet formats and Aurora and Redshift backups. Oracle touts the technology as useful for marketing analytics, particularly real-time analysis of advertising campaign performance and customer data analytics.

Oracle’s AWS support for HeatWave Lakehouse is designed to allow enterprises that store massive amounts of data on AWS to use Lakehouse for transaction processing and analytics, avoiding data egress fees (and keeping revenues flowing into Oracle’s coffers, of course).

A different song

Oracle’s multi-cloud support is a different song than the company sang in previous years when it tried—and failed spectacularly — to keep customers on its own cloud. In particular, Oracle saw AWS as a hated competitor. Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder, chairman and CTO, expended much energy casting shade on AWS wherever he could find ears to bend.

But enterprises today demand multi-cloud, Leung said.

“People use multiple clouds. They use best-of-breed. Our customers want choice.”

In addition to the AWS support, Oracle added support for Red Hat OpenShift running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) following the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on OCI earlier this year.

Enterprises use OpenShift as the underlying basis for their computing environments, running applications such as billing systems and customer applications. By running on OpenShift, enterprises can move those applications between multiple clouds, including OCI, Leung said.

The AWS and Red Hat tie-ups come on the heels of a high-profile deal last week to bring Oracle Autonomous Database to Microsoft Azure.

But wait, there’s more

Also at CloudWorld, Oracle announced that partners can now order Oracle Alloy, a private-label version of Oracle Cloud that Managed Service Providers (MSPs), telcos and other partners can sell to their own customers. With Oracle technology under the hood, these partners can get into the cloud provider business themselves. Partners can often offer industry-specific expertise, applications and local government support that’s not available to Oracle, Leung said.

NRI in Japan is an early Alloy adopter to serve its financial customers, Oracle said.  The vendor announced Alloy last year. 

Oracle also:

• Added support for running Amdocs telecom billing and operations software on OCI.

• Launched Foundations services for automating managing user access to Oracle’s cloud.

• Added support for additional application development capabilities, including improved performance of GraalOS, OCI Functions and Arm support for OCI runtimes. Arm is often less expensive than other compute instances, with improved performance, Leung said.

• Partnered with Thales, a security provider, on managing encryption keys.

• Introduced Oracle Fusion Applications Environment Management for unified management of Oracle Fusion applications across OCI and native OCI services such as Digital Assistant, Visual Builder, AI and security services.

The CloudWorld conference opens as Oracle’s overall competitiveness in the cloud improves. In its FY2024 Q1 earnings, OCI grew 66% year-over-year, faster than its hyperscale cloud infrastructure rivals, and total cloud revenues, including applications, soared 30% to $4.6 billion in the quarter, noted Futurum Group analyst Ron Westfall.

Support for HeatWave on AWS and OpenShift on OCI “further strengths Oracle’s multi-cloud credentials,” Westfall said. MySQL HeatWave was already available on OCI, AWS and Azure, and the additional support for Lakehouse is “a logical progression,” he said.

And OpenShift support will “burnish hybrid cloud integration and deployment flexibility for Oracle customers,” he concluded.