Oracle’s unique approach to cloud expansion (Sabong News)
Author
MB Technews
Date
MARCH 31 2022
To support its global customers, Oracle has been actively launching highly available cloud data centers globally that prioritize security, availability, performance, and price.
This said Jae Sook Evans, Chief Information Officer at Oracle, who stressed that these data centers are grouped into independent regions and each region offers hundreds of services (such as virtual machines and storage).
“Towards the end of the last calendar year, we launched a total of 8 regions – 7 commercial regions (Singapore, Marseille, Israel, Abu Dhabi, Stockholm, Milan including our latest launch in South Africa), along with a second dedicated region for Nomura Research Institute in Japan – all within an ~11 week period. That’s an average of one region every one-and-a-half weeks!
Most impressively, we’ve gained velocity at scale – not only have we reduced the time needed for each region build, but we’ve also more than tripled the number of services offered by
.”
To meet our continued phenomenal growth, we’re building cloud regions as fast as customers around the world demand. Our customers have never been more dependent on the cloud than they are today. They need a cloud that’s architected to run their critical workloads and that supports their business needs with superior price performance, doesn’t overcharge for data egress, and is available in regions that meet their data locality requirements and internal governance needs – This also includes dedicated regions
where customers get all the benefits of OCI cloud services maintained by Oracle, but inside their own data centers.
To meet this demand, we are treating our region builds “as-a-service,” and we’re turning this rapid and reliable capability into a core competency — and a key differentiator. It is only by fully automating our builds and launches that we can reliably and rapidly launch all services in all regions, in any of the configurations we offer (commercial, government, dedicated region, etc.), said Evans.
“We invested in an end-to-end automation program that organizes work and reports progress. Most importantly, we aligned on a set of measurable goals and outcomes as our success criteria.”
Evans cited other important details of this development:
The new deployment technology in which we invested allowed us to dramatically reduce the time and effort it takes to build regions, as well as to create a uniform deployment pipeline across all region types. We used existing OCI engineering and architecture review processes to help connect teams with experienced architects and obtain feedback on the design and architectural changes that were necessary to reach region build automation.
Before our automation campaign, building out the OCI cloud consisted of carrying out thousands of infrastructure and software deployments, executed and coordinated by hundreds of engineers across many cross-functional teams. Without automation, this requires extensive manual coordination across many services and their dependencies in proper order and tedious manual data transfer processes.
Foundationally, we built our own automated deployment pipeline software and capabilities to help identify service dependencies;
From there, we extended the automation capabilities across all software components and the integrations between services that make up building out a region.
Automation can help businesses overhaul processes and achieve big savings – whether that be time, labor, or money – but implementing it requires iteration and experimentation. Our automation work taught us to:
Automation is helping us build regions more quickly while slashing error rates, and as our teams achieve complete touchless automation, our engineers spend less time on tedious configurations and more time figuring out how to build an even better, faster cloud.
