Oracle CloudWorld keynote: Ellison ushers in open, multicloud phase of cloud era

The time has come for the largest cloud infrastructure providers to “gracefully” open and integrate their systems, Oracle Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison asserted during his Oracle CloudWorld keynote address on September 10. And if anyone needed evidence of the sincerity of that sentiment, it came when Ellison warmly welcomed Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman to the stage.

The competition between Oracle and AWS has been fierce in recent years. But in a multicloud world, rivals also have to be partners. Their customers insist on it, Ellison said.

“Years and years ago we had a wonderful relationship with Amazon, and we have lots of customers in common,” Ellison said to Garman. “I think we both listen to those customers.”

Most large enterprises now use two, sometimes three, cloud infrastructures. As such, Oracle, AWS, Google, and Microsoft—the industry’s four hyperscalers—have an obligation to integrate their offerings so customers can seamlessly combine diverse software to create unified applications, as they used to before the advent of cloud computing ended an era of open systems, Ellison said.

Oracle is taking the initiative. Its groundbreaking partnership with Amazon—a service called Oracle Database@AWS, planned for release in the next 12 months—will embed dedicated Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) inside AWS data centers to run Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Exadata Database Service.

Garman said AWS customers often urged him to collaborate with Oracle. “They really wanted to run all of those mission-critical workloads inside of AWS, where their applications are; but they need low latency to their database,” he said.

Those customers will be able to provision Oracle databases through the AWS console and pay for them in their AWS bill, providing the desired feel of an AWS service, he said. Garman added that there’s already a “pretty impressive list of enterprises” that have expressed excitement about the joint offering.

“Giving customers choices has always been good for our business,” Ellison said. “And you give customers lots and lots of choices in AWS.”

“I think it's going to work out well for us and well for all the people here today,” he told the Oracle CloudWorld audience.

The AWS partnership comes on the heels of similar cloud infrastructure deals that Oracle has forged with Microsoft and Google, launching services called Oracle Database@Azure and Oracle Database@Google Cloud.

“The clouds are becoming open,” he said of this new phase of the cloud era. “They're no longer walled gardens. Customers will have choices.”

Defending the open cloud

As the cloud becomes more open and expansive, cyberattacks are escalating, Ellison noted. Every year, enterprises pay more in ransom to hackers. The growing challenge of protecting data, applications, identities, and networks has become too much for mere humans—at least on their own.

Thankfully, cyberdefenders have a powerful ally. Oracle has enlisted an army of robots to protect its cloud in ways only AI can.

That started a few years ago with the release of Oracle Autonomous Database. Recognizing that human error was the main culprit in costly data breaches, Oracle created the AI-powered database, which encrypts data, backs itself up and recovers, and installs updates and security patches—without human intervention.

“It’s really interesting that it is the most economical way to do things and the safest way to do things,” Ellison said.

Many Oracle applications already run on Autonomous Database. By next year, Oracle’s flagship applications, including Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and HCM, as well as NetSuite, are planned to migrate to the service.

Another form of AI, built into the Oracle APEX low-code development platform, is helping protect applications from the moment they start being built, as poorly written code can cause security vulnerabilities. In fact, the security benefits that come with APEX are even more important than the 10X productivity gains the platform delivers by writing your code, Ellison said. Oracle APEX not only generates reliable, highly scalable, and secure applications, but it can also properly create stateless applications that are fully recoverable.

Protecting users was once mostly a matter of passwords—those 17-digit nuisances that are hard to remember and always need to be changed. No more.

“The idea that we use passwords is a ridiculous idea,” Ellison said. “It’s obsolete, and it’s very dangerous.” People end up writing down their passwords and reusing them across their online profiles, making them valuable items on the dark web.

Biometrics eliminate the need to memorize these cumbersome sequences of characters and digits; users’ faces, fingerprints, and voices now provide authentication instead. These technologies deliver far superior security, Ellison said, while saving users time and grief.

Winning the cyberwars

Network security, another pillar of cloud security, poses what Ellison called an “astoundingly complicated problem.”

Oracle has a relatively simple solution, Ellison said, one that is possible only on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. It comes in the form of OCI Zero Trust Packet Routing, or OCI ZPR. This new standard is built on technology created by computing pioneer Danny Hillis and the team at Applied Invention.

The fundamental problem is that configuring a network presents two competing goals: maximizing speed, performance, and reliability on one hand and protecting data on the other. The solution involves separating the network configuration process from security altogether, Ellison said.

Here again, AI-powered robots do the lion’s share of the work. Network administrators need to focus only on configuring, and reconfiguring, their enterprises’ networks in a way that optimizes performance. They then write natural language policies that limit network traffic based on the resources and data services that need to be accessed, such as an accounting application connecting to an accounting database. ZPR generates the code by which robots inspect every packet through the network—billions every second—and make sure they aren’t going where they don’t belong.

This approach to security works only because of Oracle’s differentiated RDMA network architecture and network processors, Ellison said.

With biometrics and OCI ZPR, systems are much more difficult to infiltrate, and it’s “pretty much impossible to move data out of the system across an unauthorized route,” Ellison told CloudWorld attendees. “All of these AI technologies give us a chance to win the cyberwars.”

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