Nov 21, 2023
00:00
Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your
cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll
bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle
technologies. Let’s get started.
00:26
Nikita: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Nikita
Abraham, Principal Technical Editor with Oracle University, and
with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs.
Lois: Hi there! If you’ve been following along with us, you’ll know
we just completed our first three seasons of the Oracle University
Podcast. We’ve had such a great time exploring OCI, Data
Management, and Cloud Applications business processes. And we’ve
had some pretty awesome special guests, too.
00:56
Nikita: Yeah, it’s been so great having them on and so educational
so do check out those episodes if you missed any of them.
Lois: As we close out the year, we thought this would be a good
time to revisit some of our most popular episodes with you. Over
the next few weeks, you’ll be able to listen to six of our most
popular episodes from this year.
Nikita: Right, this is the best of the best–according to you–our
listeners.
01:20
Lois: Today’s episode is #1 of 6 and is a throwback to a discussion
with our Principal OCI Instructor Sergio Castro on multi-cloud.
Keep in mind that this chat took place before the release of Oracle
University’s course and certification on multi-cloud. It’s
available now on mylearn.oracle.com so if it interests you, you
should go check it out.
Nikita: We began by asking Sergio to help us with the basics and
explain what multi-cloud is. So, let’s dive right in. Here we
go!
01:51
Sergio: Good question. So multi-cloud is leveraging the best
offering of two or more cloud service providers. This as a strategy
for an IT solution. And Oracle embraces multi-cloud. This strategy
was clearly communicated during Open World in Las Vegas last year.
We even had demos where OCI presenters opened the cloud Graphic
User Interface of other providers during our live sessions. So the
concise answer to the question is multi-cloud is two or more cloud
vendors providing a consolidated solution to a customer.
02:29
Nikita: So, would an example of this be when a customer uses OCI
and Azure?
Sergio: Absolutely. Yes, exactly. That's what it is. We can say
that our official multi-cloud approach started with the
interconnect agreement with Azure. But customers, they have already
been leveraging our FastConnect partners for interconnecting with
other cloud providers. The interconnect agreement with Azure just
made it easier. Oracle tools such as Oracle Integration and Golden
Gate have been multi-cloud ready even prior to our official
announcement.
And if you look at the Oracle's document... the documents from
Oracle, you can find VPN access to other cloud providers, but we
can talk about that shortly.
03:16
Nikita: OK. So, why would organizations use a multi-cloud strategy?
What do they gain by doing that?
Sergio: Oh, there are many reasons why organizations might want to
use a multi-cloud strategy. For example, a customer might want to
have vendor redundancy. Having the application running with one
vendor and having the other vendor just stand by in case something
goes wrong with that cloud provider. So it is best practices not to
rely on just one cloud service provider. Another customer might
want to have the application with one tier or the application tier
with one cloud provider and their database tier with another cloud
provider.
03:53
Sergio: So this is a solution leveraging the best to cloud
providers. Another company or another reason might be a company
acquired another one, you know purchasing a second company, and
they have different cloud providers and they just want to integrate
their cloud resources. So every single cloud provider offer unique
solutions and customers want to leverage these strong points. For
example, we all know that AWS was the first infrastructure access
service provider, and the industry adopted them.
Then other players came along like OCI and customers realized that
there are better and less expensive options that now they can take
advantage of. So cloud migration is another reason why multi-cloud
interconnectivity is needed.
04:42
Lois: Wow! There really are a lot of different use cases for
multi-cloud.
Sergio: Yeah, absolutely. There is, Lois. So Golden Gate, for
example, this is an Oracle product. Oracle Golden Gate allows
replication from two different databases. So if a customer wants to
replicate the Oracle Database in OCI, in Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure, to a SQL server in Azure, this is possible. And now
there's an OCI to Azure interconnect (live) and it can facilitate
this, this database replication. And if a start-up needs to
communicate OCI to Google Cloud Platform, for example, but a
digital circuit is not economically viable, then we have published
step-by-step configuration instructions for site-to-site VPN, and
this includes all the steps on the Google Cloud Platform as well.
So these are some of the different use cases.
05:37
Lois: So, what should you keep in mind when you're designing a
multi-cloud solution?
Sergio: The first thing that comes to mind is business continuity.
It is very important to have High Availability and Disaster
Recovery strategies. This to keep the lights on and focus on the
organization's current technology, the organization's current
needs, the company's vision, and the offering from the cloud
service providers out there. The current offerings that each cloud
service provider brings to this company.
For example, if an organization's on-premises, current deployment
consists of Microsoft applications and Oracle Databases, and they
want to use as much as they can of their current knowledge base
that their staff has acquired through the years, it only makes
sense to take the apps to Azure and the database to Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure and either leverage ODSA, Oracle Database Solution
for Azure, or our OCI-Azure interconnect regions. We have 12 of
those.
06:39
Sergio: So ODSA was designed with Azure cloud architects in mind.
The Oracle Database solution for Azure. For each database provision
using ODSA, the service delivers OCI database metrics, OCI events,
and OCI logs to tools such as Azure Application Insights, Azure
Event Grid, and Azure Log Analytics.
But the concise key points to keep in mind are latency, security,
data movement, orchestration, and operation management.
07:10
Nikita: So, latency... security... Can you tell us a little bit
more about these?
Sergio: Yes, latency is crucial. If an application needs, let's say
X milliseconds, 3 milliseconds response time, the multi-cloud
solution better meet these needs. We recently published a blog post
where we released the millisecond response of our 12 interconnect
sites to Azure and OCI. We have 12 interconnect sites of Azure
regions to 12 regions from OCI. Now, regarding security, in Oracle,
we pride ourselves for being a security company. Security is at our
core of who we are and we have taken this approach to multi-cloud.
This for encryption of data at rest, encryption of data in transit,
masking the data in the database, security key management, patching
service, Identity and Access Management, Web Application Firewall.
All of these solutions from Oracle are very well suited for
multi-cloud approach.
08:17
Lois: OK, what about data movement, orchestration and operation
management? You mentioned those.
Sergio: I mentioned Golden Gate earlier. So you can use this
awesome tool for replication. You can also use this for migration.
But data movement is much more than replication, like real live
transactions taking place and backup strategies. We have options
for all of this. Our object storage, our bulky regions backup
strategies. Now for orchestration, the Oracle API Gateway avoids
vendor lock-in and enables you to publish APIs with private
endpoints that are accessible from within your network and which
you can expose with a public IP address. This in case you want to
accept traffic from the internet.
09:07
Nikita: Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for explaining those, Sergio.
Now, what multi-cloud services does OCI have?
Sergio: So I already mentioned a few like ODSA, the Oracle Database
Solution for Azure. So, this is where Azure customers can easily
provision, access, and operate an Oracle Database enterprise-grade
and the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with a familiar Azure-like
experience. ODSA was jointly announced back in July 2022 by our CTO
Larry Ellison and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. He's the CEO. This was
last year.
And we also announced the MySQL Heatwave, which is available on
AWS. This solution offers online transactional processing
analytics, machine learning, and automation with a single, MySQL
database. So OCI multi-cloud approach started when the OCI regions
interconnected via FastConnect to Azure regions Express Route. This
was back in June of 2019.
10:12
Sergio: Other products for multi-cloud include OCI integration
services, OCI Golden Gate, the Oracle API Gateway, Observability
and Management, and Oracle Data Sync to name a few.
Nikita: So we've been working in multi-cloud services since 2019.
Interesting.
Lois: It really is. Sergio, can you tell us a little bit about the
type of organizations that can benefit from multi-cloud?
10:36
Sergio: Absolutely. My pleasure. So organizations of all sizes and
of all industries can benefit from multi-cloud, from start-ups to
companies in the top 100 of the Forbes list and from every corner
of the world, you name it, every corner of the world. So it's
available worldwide for customers, the Oracle customers. There are
also customers, and we know this of other providers.
So in terms of cloud, it's to the customers' benefit that cloud
service providers have a multi-cloud strategy. In OCI
<inaudible>, OCI has been a pioneer in multi-cloud. It was in
2019 when the FastConnect to Express Route partnership was
announced. And Site-to-Site VPN is also available to all three of
our major cloud competitors. So the beauty of the last word, cloud
competitors, is that indeed they are our competitors and we try to
win businesses away from them.
11:29
Sergio: But at the same time, our customers demand the ability for
cloud providers to work with each other and our customers are
right. And for this reason, we embrace multi-cloud. Recently, the
federal government announced that they selected four cloud
providers: OCI, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. And also,
Uber announced a major deal with OCI and Google Cloud Platform. So
these customers, they want us to work together.
So multi-cloud is a way to go, strategy and we want to make our
customers happy. So we will operate and work with these cloud
providers, service providers.
12:09
Nikita: That's really great. So a customer can take advantage of
the benefits of OCI, even if they have other services running on
another cloud provider. Now if I wanted to become a multi-cloud
developer or a cloud architect, how would I go about getting
started? Is there a certification I can get?
Sergio: Absolutely. Excellent question. I love this question. So
this depends on where you are in your cloud journey. If you are
already a cloud knowledgeable engineer with either AWS or Azure,
you can start with our OCI for Azure Architect and OCI for AWS
Architect. We have courses for both. And if you are just getting
started with cloud and you want to learn OCI, you can start with
our OCI Foundations as the path to OCI and as you progress along,
we have OCI Architect Associate, we have OCI Architect
Professional. So there's a clear path, but if you have a specialty
like a developer's or operations or multi-cloud certification, so
we have all of this for you. And regarding the OCI Architect
Professional certification, it contains in the learning path a
lesson and a demo on how to interconnect OCI and Azure from the
ground up.
13:23
Lois: And all of this training is available for free on
mylearn.oracle.com, right?
Sergio: Yes, that is correct, Lois. Just visit the site,
mylearn.oracle.com, and create an account. The site keeps track of
your learning progress and you can always come back and continue
from where you left off, at your own speed.
13:42
Lois: That's great. And what if I don't want to get certified right
now?
Sergio: Of course, you do not have to be pursuing a certification
to gain access to the training in MyLearn. If you are only
interested in the OCI to Azure interconnection lesson, for example,
you can go right to that course in MyLearn, bypassing all the other
material. Just watch that lesson. If you're interested, follow
along with the demo on your own environments.
14:09
Nikita: So you can take as much or as little training as you want.
That's wonderful.
Sergio: Absolutely it is. And with regards to other OCI products
that are great for multi-cloud, our API Gateway is greatly covered
in our OCI Developer Professional certification. The awesome news
that I'm bringing to you right now is that soon Oracle University
will release a new OCI multi-cloud certification. This is going to
be accompanied by with the learning path and the multi-cloud
certification, this is what I'm currently at this moment working
on. We are designing the material. We are having fun right now
doing the labs, and shortly, we will write the test
questions.
14:51
Lois: That's great news. You know I love to share a sneak peek at
new training we're working on. Thank you so much, Sergio, for
giving us your time today. This was really insightful.
Sergio: On the contrary, thank you. And thanks to everyone who's
listening. I encourage you to go ahead and link your multiple cloud
accounts and if you have questions, feel free to reach out. You can
find me in the Oracle University Learning Community.
15:15
Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. And like we were
saying before, the multi-cloud course has been released and has
quickly become one of our most sought-after certifications. So, if
you want to access the multi-cloud course, visit
mylearn.oracle.com.
Lois: Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then,
this is Lois Houston…
Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off!
15:39
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