Oracle Cloud Gen 2

On October 22nd, Larry Ellison presented the latest, state-of-the-art Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: Autonomous.

Arguably it has always been Oracle’s core product: its Database engine. It is has been powers up a lot lately. We have it in the Cloud, and right now we have it in its Autonomous mode.
Based on Larry’s latest keynote here:

Larry’s take was, to my understanding, the following: they have robots, you need robots to defend yourself. Basically, Star Wars.

On its new architecture, Ellison claims that the are having Autonomous Robots that find and kill threats. This all feels a bit extreme, but kudos for Oracle at taking the lead in this field.

So what about the changes in the cloud? What does it mean to move from Gen 1 to Gen 2? Larry shed some light on the matter:

So you would be moving from an overall shared environment to a split environment between the “Bare Metal” system and the “Cloud Control Computer”. This should prevent user code to affect shared environment. Pretty cool, right?

Gen2 Public Cloud is available now according to Ellison, and it will be ready for customers in 2019.
They will also be offering a free upgrade from Gen 1 to Gen 2 DB for any of their customers.
Of course, key issues tackled by Ellison was Pricing and Speed:

How do they achieve this speeds? They’ve change the model to a low-latency, high bandwidth Remote Direct Memory Access Cluster Architecture:

The other strategy was based on focusing in security,  a key aspect of GEN 2 Cloud:

Ellison then expanded into key security services provided in GEN 2 Cloud:

• Key Management Service: Customer controls encryption keys for all storage layers
• Cloud Access Security Broker: Automatically and continuously monitors and remediates changes and threats
• Web Application Firewall: seems like a normal firewall
• Distributed Denial of Service Protection: Automated DDoS attack detection and mitigation

I feel a bit unsafe now running GEN 1 products, since it looks like now the focus is on security.

Ellison made sure to mention that GEN 2 is the only thing they are selling, so if you are a GEN 1 user, be prepared to migrate in no more than a year.

He then compared Oracle Autonomous Database vs AWS Semi-autonomous DB development currently going on:

Semi-autonomous Databases are like a semi-self-driving car. You get in, you drive and you die

Larry Ellison

Oracle’s Chairman mentioned that the Autonomous DB is Serverless and Elastic. What does this mean? That the user won’t be seeing where is that DB running on, pretty much. This has its upsides and downside. Any customer running Oracle Cloud should know that by now 😉

The message is then to AUTOMATE EVERYTHING.

Another idea mentioned is the use of Machine Learning in its autonomous solutions: in Autonomous DB, SQL queries will be machine-optimized. Currently, if you run an explain plan you should see where your query takes the most time, but apparently this should help you skipping that step (at least in theory!).

Then he moved into Autonomous Datawarehouse, mentioning how a computer optimized version of the system worked much better than an expert tuned one, every time (he tested it, of course!):

Ellison announced that for customers that don’t want serverless, Oracle still provides dedicated infrastructure solutions using Exadata Cloud Infrastructure:

How do Oracle guarantee lower running costs?

Finally, he wrapped up showing benchmarks between Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing vs Amazon Aurora 

Finally, Ellison rounded up the presentation offering a 2 TB Autonomus Database for free for 3300 hours