Oracle pushes Cloud as a Service, AI/ML for data analysis

The Oracle CloudWorld conference this week brings together developers and customers to showcase new cloud services, database services and more.

Making better business decisions faster is a top priority for tech-savvy organizations today, as shown in the top announcements from Oracle’s CloudWorld conference. The biggest announcement in the edge and cloud computing world from Oracle is Oracle Alloy, a cloud infrastructure platform designed to let organizations become cloud providers to their customers. Take a look at their other offerings, including the newest version of Oracle’s Database 23c, several new distributed cloud offerings and the updated MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse database tool.

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Oracle Alloy

Partner organizations can use this cloud infrastructure platform in their own data centers, an interesting option that allows for flexibility in terms of regulatory requirements. It also allows organizations to extend partnerships they may already have with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure into the public sector or other industries that might want to operate clouds independently, turning them into intermediary cloud providers.

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“Customers are increasingly seeking to run their workloads in specific locations and run these workloads in the cloud of their choice,” Oracle found.

The Alloy platform offers the same 100+ infrastructure and platform services accessible in OCI’s public cloud. From there, customers can add their own branding, SDKs, documentation, pricing, account types and discount schedules. Alloy is open to customers bringing specific hardware appliances into the ecosystem and using whatever works best for them locally to bring the Oracle-supported cloud.

Containers and Kubernetes are both commonly spoken of in the same breath as today’s cloud computing. Oracle hopes to cut down on the complexity and management overhead needed for developers to run them. Virtual Nodes provide granular, pod-level elasticity with per-pod pricing based on consumed resources without the need for managing as much infrastructure.

Next on the docket is an update to Oracle’s database cloud service for MySQL, HeatWave Lakehouse. HeatWave is an enhancement for an analytics database service for MySQL, to improve speed in transactional and analytics services. This cluster of memory processes and queries hundreds of terabytes of data in the object store in a variety of file formats. Customers using it hail from the marketing analytics, automotive, telecommunications, high-tech and other industries.

MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse was created in coordination with AMD and is, as such, optimized for AMD EPYC-powered Oracle cloud instances. Data size has increased up to 400 TB of data, and the HeatWave cluster scales to 512 nodes. It is also ready to run in multiple clouds, including OCI, AWS and now Microsoft Azure.

OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery Service provides a top-down look for customers into their recovery process, viewing the entire technology stack from the OCI console.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are becoming the eyes and ears of the industry as Oracle turns them to Analytics Cloud and other Oracle Cloud Infrastructure cognitive services like AI Vision, all in at-a-glance dashboards.

Along with a bevy of Oracle Fusion Analytics products, several new Oracle Analytics Cloud capabilities were announced this week that come from AI/ML roots. A semantic modeler makes a more readable layer between business users and the complexity of the physical data sources in a central curated semantic model.

Business users can also take advantage of advanced composite visualizations to move metrics around charts and to analyze data patterns and signals. Another one-click function provides proactive automated insights for creating visualizations, based on Oracle Analytics Cloud.

Autonomous Data Warehouse in particular comes with a new coat of paint. It can now take advantage of a new Excel add-in and boasts a new complete and embedded data-integration tool with Transforms. Stream analytics tool OCI GoldenGate has new capabilities for discovering and testing for outliers and anomalies, applying insights from ML models and helps decide the next best course of action.

Overall, visibility, ease of use and cloud connectivity came across as themes for Oracle’s recent announcements.

Find more information about Oracle cloud products, and comparisons between Oracle and Workday HR software or Oracle and SAP’s ERP software.