Is there a PaaS Private Cloud@Customer coming soon?

A couple of years ago, I wrote a blog comparing leaving the Datacentre to Brexit. Whilst being neutral (completely pH7), the point of the blog was that there were many reasons for going to the cloud and/or staying on-premises. These included the age of the application/design, client-server architecture, or that nobody knew where the binaries for an application were (so best to leave it where it is). It could also have been that you had mainframe/RISC architecture, and nobody offered a credible cloud offering to your requirements.

The punchline was that you could move your physical on-premises infrastructure to a service provider, such as Equinix and have your legacy apps/infrastructure adjacent to the cloud edge, subscribing to what you want and keeping what you have to.

However, that was two years ago, and since then, we have seen many vendors deliver on-premises cloud solutions. They are bringing the virtue of cloud subscription/billing/flexibility to the customers' own DC or hosting facility, often for various reasons. When we look at Oracle, their offering is its Exadata Cloud@Customer (now in its 2nd generation), a mature product using their X9 generation Exadata Systems. You can check out our own service expertise in this field here.

The Exadata Cloud@Customer provides a new way of consuming Oracle Database. It allows the business to cross-charge internally based on usage. In addition, it enables businesses to provide short-term test environments that could be switched off or killed after use without the CAPEX of licence purchases. This revolutionary approach allows the customer to either bring their license to a BYOL model and/or subscription for all usage, or burst on top of their license entitlement.

This leaves the little unknown Private Cloud@Customer (PC@C). In essence, it is Exadata's sister product focused on non-RAC databases, mainly Middleware and Application hosting, along with general IaaS. This machine currently offers the ability to consume infrastructure in an IaaS model. However, this is where the stack stops.

This year at Oracle CloudWorld 2022, we eagerly anticipate the release of the next generation of the PC@C. This time, the difference would be the ability to use a PaaS model for other Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). After all, the new and current PCA X9 uses a cutback version of Oracle's OCI stack for management and IaaS deployment, so Oracle is nearly there with its delivery.

So why is this important, and why is it relevant to my previous blog? Well, when Oracle has both an @Customer Exadata and PCA PaaS delivery systems, the customer will get the choice to run a whole red stack of Oracle technology products on-premises but with a cloud subscription model. More importantly, this can be anywhere they see fit. For example, we see many deployments at their existing premises (DC or CoLo). Or, strategically, they could be at a cloud edge datacentre such as Equinix, placing the Oracle services and customer application stacks where the customer needs them to be, even adjacent to other cloud providers.

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