Oracle Database@Google Cloud – 6 reasons this is a big announcement

It was great to wake up this morning to see some fantastic financial results from Oracle Corporation, but the more interesting component, was the announcement around OracleDatabase@Google Cloud. Google and Oracle have announced a new collaboration that allows customers to combine OCI and GCP. Let's take a look at why this has happened and what it means for customers.

1. The market trend is towards Multi-cloud

If we look at the Oracle Microsoft Interconnect as a reference point, this was created back in 2019 and has developed into OracleDatabase@Azure.  What was an initial exercise around easing the automation of ‘plumbing’ two Clouds together evolved into a simplified (and popular) way to consume Oracle Database technology directly in Azure.  This natural evolution has really demonstrated the requirement in the market for Multi-cloud, so it's not really that surprising that it's now extended to Google Cloud too.

2. Oracle have done this before...

This announcement also speaks to the fact that Oracle has created (i.e. invested multi-millions) into developing a Multi-cloud turnkey solution.  The deployment pattern in Google looks identical to Azure.  Oracle Exadata Infrastructure and VM Clusters are deployed in GCP, with the Databases being created and configured in OCI. Larry Ellison has advocated a ‘marketplace of Clouds’ before – could we see this replicated in other vendors as well, even AWS 😳? I wouldn’t bet against it. Let’s not forget too that we already have Oracle Cloud@Customer as well.

3. Will this mean a new kind of competition?

This creates an interesting competitive dynamic now between Microsoft and Google with both Clouds now being able to provide a seamless integration with Oracle.  Will this lead to both these solutions developing new capabilities at the same rate and time, or will we see additional capabilities built-in based on the ask of the customers and technology partnerships?  Will these Clouds provide similar or different use cases?

4. It removes the complexity and disadvantages of a bare metal deployment

What’s interesting is that the new GCP & Oracle announcement has jumped straight to Oracle Database@Google Cloud, however from reading the press release the first step across 11 regions is the deploying of an Oracle / Google Interconnect, i.e. what was deployed in 2019 with Microsoft.  Ultimately this is just a precursor to the Oracle Database@Google Cloud as the end game requirement – the simplification of consuming Oracle Databases in GCP.  As a GCP partner, DSP has seen some of the complexities of deploying Oracle workloads in GCP using bare metal deployments.  The solution, while it worked, had several drawbacks and didn’t really lean into any of the benefits of multi-cloud, i.e. elasticity, flexibility and automation.

5. It’s available in the UK now!

Whilst Oracle and Google are being a bit cagey as to when they are rolling out Oracle Database@Google Cloud globally (they’ve said ‘later this year’ – calendar? fiscal?), they have said that onboarding of general purpose workloads with Google Cloud’s Cross-Cloud Interconnect can begin in 11 regions, including the UK from today. So, watch this space for when Oracle Exadata Database Service, Oracle Autonomous Database Service, and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) come online in the coming months.

6. Moving to the Cloud just became easier

There are a lot of customers who use both Oracle and Google Cloud, this partnership means they will now have access to Oracle databases running on OCI to be deployed in Oracle Cloud datacenters– and therefore make the move to Cloud all the more straightforward (and compelling). It’ll be quick and crucially, uncomplicated to deploy general purpose workloads to Google Cloud with no cross-cloud data transfer charges.

If you would like to understand how can you leverage this new development, and what it means to your organisation and its Oracle workloads, then please feel free to contact me or your usual contact at DSP.  If you’re thinking of moving your ERP workloads to GCP, the time and complexity has just been halved.  We have moved many workloads to many Clouds prior to this announcement and we only see this accelerating growth.

Find out more about Oracle Database and Google Cloud on our website or contact our experts today.

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