Best of frenemies: Oracle and AWS clouds meet with dedicated, private connections

Oracle Corp. and Amazon Web Services Inc. they seem to be putting aside their long-standing rivalry in favor of a more tangible relationship that acknowledges the reality of today’s multi-cloud technology environments.

The two technology giants today unveiled a plan to establish a private, high-speed connection between Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and the AWS cloud. Combined customers will be able to move data and run applications across them with reduced latency. By establishing a direct connection between Oracle Interconnect and AWS Interconnect-multicloud, the two companies can provide companies with a fully managed, enterprise-grade pipeline that effectively transforms their cloud platforms into a unified computing environment.

The move reflects a business shift to a “multicloud” infrastructure that uses a number of cloud platforms and software services. Multicloud is not new, of course, but until recently organizations have struggled to properly integrate different clouds.

Historically, they have been forced to build their own connections, and have relied on the messy patchwork of third-party network providers, manual configuration and expensive virtual infrastructure. This has led to major “gravity” problems, where data gets stuck in one cloud location because it’s too expensive or complicated to move it where it’s needed.

These problems have become worse with the rise of artificial intelligence. Modern AI applications often run on a split-stack architecture – for example, a company might use high-performance databases in Oracle’s OCI and AWS SageMaker for application logic and model training. It’s not easy to change things once they’re up and running, and without a highly efficient bridge between the two clouds, such workloads can suffer from extreme latency, limiting their performance.

This is the challenge that Oracle and AWS now want to solve with today’s announcement, and it is quite surprising since the two companies have long been extremely critical of each other. However, it appears that both will benefit from being “frenemies” and having data flow between their clouds as if they were a single, unified platform.

To that end, Oracle combines its native communication service with the AWS Interconnect-multicloud definition to create a secure and private connection that completely bypasses the public Internet. Doing so will enable companies to support split-stack deployments, so organizations can run an application on OCI and store its data on AWS, or vice versa.

Besides, they now have a way to move all their data from one cloud to another, without the usual difficulties that come with such a migration. Notably, Oracle said the new connection is “managed” and “native,” meaning customers don’t need to set up manual routing or design complex data replication strategies. By connecting to the AWS specification, Oracle is essentially benchmarking how its cloud compares to its competitors’ platforms.

Rob Strechay, principal analyst at CUBE Research and Smuget Consulting, told SiliconANGLE that today’s move underscores the belief that multicloud is no longer just a strategy, but a reality for all businesses. “By removing the complexity of communication between two large domains, Oracle and AWS make cross-cloud resilience and AI architectures more feasible for businesses,” he said.

Improved cloud connectivity will likely accelerate the adoption of cloud environments even more. Strechay said the complexity of communication has been one of the biggest challenges holding many businesses back from adopting different environments. Businesses need a solution, he added, because the future of AI probably won’t be in a single wave.

“The future of AI is where your data lives in one place, your models run in another, and the network doesn’t interfere,” Strechay said. “This also enables organizations to more easily mitigate cloud-related disasters. While it always makes sense for data to be stored on paper, Oracle makes it possible without building a data science project.”

The declaration has an example. Another competitor, Google Cloud, has long been open to multicloud realities, launching its Cross-Cloud Interconnect service back in May 2023, before following up with dedicated private connections to AWS last December. On the other hand, Oracle has already established connections with Google Cloud and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure.

Nathan Thomas, Oracle’s senior vice president of product management, said today’s announcement builds on previous collaborations between the two cloud giants that led to the introduction of Oracle Database@AWS, which made it possible to run Oracle database operations in the AWS cloud with ease. “This will help our collaborative customers modernize their systems, integrate their data, and open up new AI productivity opportunities,” he promised.

The high-performance link is designed for enterprise-class workloads and will leverage Oracle’s network of 26 interconnected partner cloud regions. It is expected to go live later this year, with initial availability in the AWS US East (N. Virginia) region.

Photo: SiliconANGLE/Gemini