Analysis At Big Red's recent CloudWorld shindig in Las Vegas, Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, looked comfortable and relaxed being hosted by arch rival Oracle.

Since 2018, Big Red has been pitching its second generation cloud OCI against its market-dominating rival with limited success. In 2019, Ellison claimed Oracle's technology is more secure than public cloud competitors like AWS because separate security processors insulate customer workloads. "No other cloud service provider offers this kind of protection," he claimed at the time.

But now, having completed deals with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, Oracle has struck an agreement with the market leader, in which all its hardware and database technology will sit in AWS data centers, making a more proximal arrangement with other cloud services.

On stage at CloudWorld, Garman said AWS was the "most popular cloud out there, and they love the security of AWS."

He added, "They love the scalability of AWS, and they want to run some of their most mission critical workloads. They already run them on Oracle, and they were having trouble figuring out, 'How do I pick A or B?' And they said, 'I want to pick A and B'."

For example, Best Buy runs many of its systems inside of AWS, including recommendations for their customers and ecommerce applications, and they run their core database workloads on Oracle. The retailer was trying to decide how it could get its Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) to work in a low latency way with all their applications. "This is a great solution for them," Garman said in reference to the alliance with Oracle.

He said Oracle Exadata database, hardware, and RAC would all sit inside of the AWS datacenter, but appear to customers as part of the AWS console, with the billing in AWS and support through either AWS or Oracle.

Garman said the arrangement would offer zero extraction burden when using AWS analytics tools like Sagemaker on data in the system, dubbed Oracle Database@AWS by Big Red.

In a statement, Oracle said its Oracle Database@AWS could "seamlessly" connect to applications running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), AWS Analytics services, or AWS's advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) services, including Amazon Bedrock. Oracle has already dabbled in commercializing its databases in AWS. In 2022, it launched a service with its SQL-based analytics system Heatwave in the market-leading cloud.

Nick Walter, CTO and vice president of professional consulting services at Oracle consultancy House of Brick, said the AWS cloud environment has always been an attractive target for Oracle database migrations.

"Unfortunately, technical or licensing hurdles for a few key Oracle Database technologies, mainly Oracle Real Application Clusters, have long been a headache when trying to plan and execute a migration. This new partnership between Oracle and AWS suggests that these challenges are going to be jointly addressed and organizations are going to have a smoother experience migrating and operating Oracle technology stacks in the AWS environment."

He said that for organizations with legacy applications built on Oracle technology stacks, guaranteed compatibility and support would be attractive in the AWS offering.

"Oracle has a long history of casting doubt on the technical supportability of platforms they are competing against. Two easy examples that spring to mind are VMware vSphere in the last decade and AWS in the past few years. Now that the two organizations are aligned, their joint customers will hopefully no longer have to worry about being caught in the crossfire," Walter said.

However, the software licensing expert warned that Oracle and AWS had not yet released enough information to understand in detail how commercially attractive the deal might be to users.

"With Oracle, the devil is often in the details of the licensing contracts. Operating on the assumption that the Oracle Database @ AWS offerings will operate on the same licensing metrics as natively running Oracle databases in OCI, there are potential licensing advantages for Oracle customers given that Oracle historically creates more favorable database licensing metrics for their own platforms," he said.

The news was unlikely to "move the needle" on when Oracle database users decide whether, how and when to move to the cloud, but does provide a welcome additional option, he said.

Oracle said the users could buy the service via AWS Marketplace with existing AWS commitments and/or use their Oracle schemes such as Bring Your Own License (BYOL) which converts on-prem licenses to cloud credits as well as offering discount programs such as Oracle Support Rewards (OSR).

Walter pointed out that AWS already offered that with the Oracle Standard Edition 2 RDS License Included option, but Oracle Database @ AWS offers a broader range of Oracle products and editions. "Of course increased options also means increased confusion and greater chances that a licensing issue will be handled incorrectly," he said.

Holger Mueller, principal analyst at Constellation Research, said Oracle users would get to keep their database strategy while focusing on cloud-based apps within the cloud stacks without having to migrate data or migrate the database itself.

Oracle Database @ AWS marks the third deal Big Red has arranged with the top three cloud providers. It created Oracle Database@Azure in 2022 and Oracle Database@Google Cloud in June.

While the cloud option did not offer cost advantages over on-prem instances at face value - it is the same license and same hardware for Oracle - Mueller said the cloud vendors would be likely to compete by offering discounts.

He added that it would potentially give Oracle a boost in terms of user database strategy.

"This partnership means Oracle is the only relational DB for the enterprise left… last year Microsoft folded SQL Server, and AWS folded Athena as a competitive offering… I have not seen a vendor win so clearly like Oracle for RDBMS in my 35+ years in the industry…. Sybase, Informix, Ingres, SQL Server, Db2 - all gone," he said.

These databases are not gone per se - Db2 continues to exist and to get new features - but it is fair to said that their vendors no longer seemingly see them as a priority.

At CloudWorld, Oracle promoted its new AI features to go with its database technologies.

Eric Guyer, managing partner at Remend, an Oracle advisory firm, told us these features were being introduced for free on Oracle Database 23ai, but that deal might not last.

"The way Oracle typically works is by offering new features and once those features mature, people start using them, all of a sudden, they have to pay for it. I expect the AI features to eventually become an extra cost option to enterprise database, and I expect that to drive upgrades. It'll motivate people to move to the 23 database - or 24 eventually - but it will also keep those customers locked into making those annual software support payments," Guyer said.

Oracle database might be in a new cloud, with new AI features, but some behaviors are unlikely to change. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/09/13/oracle_embraces_aws_huddle/