2017 Highlights of Cloud Infrastructure

By: Leo Leung | Director of Product Management, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

The year 2017 was exceptional for our customers and partners. We’ve focused on empowering them with greater access and performance across the Oracle Cloud platform. Rolling out more regions which incorporate our new infrastructure architecture has played a big part in this. We’ve built in locations such as Ashburn, Virginia and Frankfurt, Germany, increasing service availability and redundancy.

We’ve enhanced our infrastructure both to support traditional workloads and advance new services and development. You can use advanced services such as the Exadata Database Cloud Service for existing workloads or our new bare metal GPU instances and Container Native Application Development Platform for new workloads.

While some Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) are focused only on new technologies and others tend towards traditional options, we are providing the best infrastructure for both.

We’ve experienced growth within many industries, and most prominently, across small to mid-sized companies like Entrust DataCard and Darling Ingredients, supporting core business applications like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). It’s great to see a broader range of organizations benefiting from the cloud.

As the demand for High Performance Computing (HPC) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) escalates, an increasing number of startups, like Bloodhound and a.i. solutions, are also leveraging our capacity for new technology applications like high-speed telemetry analysis and trajectory simulations. Our high-performance, modern infrastructure and competitive pricing are attracting enterprises that are driving innovation while looking toward the future.

We know enterprises require consistent high-performance for sensitive, mission-critical workloads, so when we launched in 2016, we made "new to the market" cloud infrastructure services like bare metal compute available, giving customers greater control and resilience over their data. After less than one year, we raised the bar, increasing performance, capacity, and scale across our entire line of virtual machine and bare metal compute instances with the release of our X7 platform. Our VMs now scale from 1 to 24 cores, 15 to 320 GB of RAM, 6.4 to 25.6 TB of local NVMe SSD (or network storage only), and 1 to 25 GbE. Our bare metal instances now offer 52 cores, 768 GB RAM, 51.2 TB of local NVMe SSD (or network storage only), and 2 x 25 GbE connectivity per instance.

We’re delivering high-performance, innovative services with game-changing pricing. Our block storage, for example, has a brand new–NVMe SSD based–architecture. This new architecture has allowed us to provide predictable storage performance at no additional cost to customers, which, in turn, enables them to build flexible and high-powered applications. Block storage is required by nearly every enterprise application, so the numbers add up. Savings of as much as 98% on hundreds of applications could result in savings of millions annually.

We continue striving to find areas of differentiation in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) that enterprises need most, and enhance these services, giving customers a competitive advantage.

What to Expect in 2018 

We predict an increase in cloud adoption both for more critical enterprise applications as well as new technologies. There is a comfort level in cloud that didn’t exist a year ago. Considering this, enterprises are increasing their trust in cloud environments for critical workloads, and are building on existing strategies, tailoring their cloud, and innovating more than ever. CSPs are complementing this movement in their services and capabilities.

Production workloads involve more systems, more capacity, more redundancy, so every bit of performance and latency matters.

Hybrid cloud is accelerating: A majority of enterprises are running a mixture of applications in the cloud and on premises, while trying to manage identities and resources across those environments. Multicloud will also continue to grow and enterprises will become more workload specific in their cloud choice. With this, CSPs may become increasingly more differentiated in terms of scale and specialization and customers will look for technologies to help them manage workloads across multiple clouds. For enterprises leveraging both hybrid and multicloud, direct connectivity like FastConnect will remain crucial as it enables large amounts of data movement and reliable, dedicated deployments to cloud environments.

In 2018, the focus for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will be on intercepting the market trends. We’ll be launching some new services at an extremely high scale to support enterprise cloud strategies. We’ve taken a major first step in our multicloud strategy in choosing Terraform as our orchestration of choice; you’ll see more big moves like this as we pick technologies that are open/de-facto standard to customers using multiple clouds. Our expansion will continue into new regions with direct connectivity leading the way to increased accessibility. We’ll solidify our position as a powerful CSP for managing both traditional and existing applications, as well as new applications as we focus on providing infrastructure where enterprises can run all of their diverse workloads.

We’ve reached an important point in cloud adoption. Cloud infrastructure has been available for more than ten years but we’re only just seeing a major breakthrough into the mainstream market and production applications. With the current acceleration in enterprise cloud, the market is primed for movement in infrastructure. The more locations we move into, the more people can adopt services within region and multi-regionally. FastConnect enhances the ability for customers to directly access Oracle Cloud in multiple locations. There is substantial opportunity moving forward; we’re just getting started.