Any startup launching today turns to the cloud for its IT infrastructure. What’s not to love about high-scale, just-in-time compute, storage, and networking resources, where you pay only for what you use?
Business leaders at established companies also know these same cloud advantages and want to harness them. So why have only a sliver of them moved their computing workloads to the cloud? Why is so much of it still done in company-owned data centers?
“The reality is they haven’t moved because it’s hard, and it’s hard because the cloud platforms and infrastructure don’t give you what you need,” says Clay Magouyrk, vice president of software development for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “It isn’t built for your use cases.”
Your use case might mean a 100 terabyte database that you have no interest in re-architecting to fit a cloud provider’s smaller data-support model. Or it might be a long-serving, trusted supply chain management application that you want to shift onto cloud infrastructure—but only with total confidence that it will run the exact same way so that users don’t even know it moved. Or your use case might be a brand new, cloud-native app that your team built, which you want to run in the same cloud as that 100 TB database.
“What people want to know is, ‘I have these types of workloads—how does this work for me?’” Magouyrk says.
Below are three high-level ways that established businesses and organizations should expect cloud infrastructure to help them meet their IT needs, along with just a few of the latest Oracle Cloud Infrastructure enhancements that make them possible.
1. Run specialized, high-performance workloads. Generic computing power is fine if you’re running general-purpose workloads. But what if you want to run high-performance computing workloads in the cloud—graphic simulations, complex financial modeling, video rendering, or scientific research? What if you’re applying complex machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to your operating data? These specialized workloads demand more than generic computing.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has added cloud services based on top-performing GPUs (graphics processing units), which are chips specially designed to process the massive data sets of high-performance workloads, including AI ones. It makes sense to run these specialized workloads in the cloud because they require vast resources, and the cloud lets companies pay for only as much of that capacity as they need to complete the job.
Oracle also has ramped up its cloud infrastructure’s networking (new 25 Gb/sec network) and storage (optimized performance through new all-flash block volume storage) to accommodate these high-performance workloads.
2. Move existing applications to the cloud more easily. Many IT teams want to keep using the applications they have but just don’t want the burden of caring and feeding the hardware that runs them. They need two big things to lift and shift those applications to the cloud: a reliable cloud infrastructure to run on, and a way to move the application so it doesn’t break in the process.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers packaged migration tools for Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft applications so that companies don’t have to hire a systems integrator for a custom project to move those apps to another supplier’s cloud. Oracle also plans to offer a new data transfer appliance to import large quantities of data into the Oracle Cloud.
3. Gain the benefits of the cloud, without leaving the benefits of the corporate data center behind. While most IT executives are eager to move to the cloud, they still like some things about their existing data centers. For example, they like the consistent, predictable performance that comes with running an application in-house, knowing that the workload isn’t hampered by another workload sharing the same hardware.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s bare metal instances provide that assurance. Database administrators like using trusted, enterprise-ready tools such as Oracle Exadata and Oracle Real Application Clusters, which they now can get as cloud services. They like having control over how much their developers spend and use—while still giving them all the freedom and speed of the cloud.
For the next wave of workloads moving to the cloud, IT leaders need to know that the infrastructure can handle their specific use case, whether it's a brand new, built-for-the-cloud application or an existing app. Says Magouyrk: “What I’m most excited about is meeting you where you’re at.”
Chris Murphy is Oracle director of cloud content.
