Best of 2023: Multicloud is the Way to Go

Sergio Castro joins Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham to explore multicloud, some of its use cases, and the reasons why many businesses are embracing this strategy.   A-Team Chronicles: https://www.ateam-oracle.com/ Oracle University Blog: https://blogs.oracle.com/oracleuniversity/ Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, the OU Podcast Team, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   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 , 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 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We’d also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.