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Oracle Cloud Strategy – An Analysis

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Oracle., the enterprise giant of the legacy era, hosted their annual user conference Oracle OpenWorld last week shed some more light on their cloud strategy. Oracle made some announcements focussed on cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain but it came out more like an organization trying to jumpstart their vehicle to catch up with competition than a thought leader pushing innovation. Oracle is almost a decade late into the cloud game and their efforts to compete is still focused on marketing than showcasing any substance. In this analysis, let us dive into Oracle’s strategy for the modern enterprise stack

Current Status

After dismissing cloud for the better part of the decade and then calling their legacy enterprise applications as cloud, Oracle started focussing on Infrastructure as a Service to take on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and IBM Bluemix. They built an infrastructure service from the ground up, tapping into AWS and Azure engineers, focussing on Compute, Storage, and Network. Then they expanded their offerings to include containers. Here is Rishidot Research’s SWOT analysis on Oracle IaaS strategy earlier this year.

Oracle OpenWorld 2017 Announcements

Oracle made many announcements at this year’s OpenWorld and we are highlighting some of the important ones on their cloud offerings

  • Oracle’s cloud strategy involves basic IaaS which competes with AWS on the “enterprise-centric” pricing strategy and vendor claims about better performance and “PaaS” (quotes used to differentiate Oracle’s definition of PaaS from the traditional industry definition of PaaS) which includes their middleware offerings and database service. At this point in time, their differentiating factor from the industry leader AWS is pricing
  • Set of container-based services on top of their IaaS to compete with container offerings by every other cloud provider. This includes Kubernetes based container service, Oracle container registry and Oracle container pipelines
  • Announcement of an open source functions as a service platform. It is an early stage software than a service on top of Oracle IaaS. However, with their middleware tools and IaaS, this could be a Oracle cloud service in the future
  • Announcements regarding AI strategy and blockchain tools in their cloud
  • Oracle 18c, their enterprise database offering with automation based in machine learning and enterprise grade SLAs

Rishidot Analysis

Oracle is building a infrastructure as a service offering with compute, storage and network. They are also adding container services to the mix. Compared to the top three cloud providers, AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud is still at a barebones stage when it comes to the depth of their offering. We expected a bunch of higher order services on top of their IaaS but we didn’t see any announcements for newer services or even a coherent roadmap to match the depth of services in the other three providers. Oracle spent the news cycles around OpenWorld focussing on a strategy that is more about reducing their bleeding than convincing newer customers about Oracle Cloud as the infrastructure for innovation. They spent way too much time in the Larry Ellison keynote on their pricing strategy compared to AWS than showcasing innovation that could make their competitors sweat. Even their pricing strategy was more about convincing the customers of Oracle database and applications to use their IaaS than enticing newer customers to start embracing their cloud. We think that the pricing strategy is more old-fashioned and focussed on enabling their salespeople to close big deals than a pricing strategy for the modern era.

It is important for the market to have Oracle as a strong player but, to compete effectively, Oracle has to go at full speed to build depth in the services they offer on top of IaaS. Building iteratively is not going to either help them close the gap with the top three providers or in giving confidence to decision makers that betting on Oracle IaaS is a smart choice. Between now and the next Oracle OpenWorld, I would love to see Oracle add a wide range of higher order services so that enterprise customers can really innovate on top of Oracle cloud. Modern enterprise CIOs are more focussed on innovation than cost savings or iterative performance improvements. They need a powerful infrastructure on top of which their developers can innovate. It is critical for Oracle leadership to understand this need and build a compelling offering to outcompete AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.

Oracle’s container strategy is on the right path but the lack of higher order services is going to hinder the developer adoption of their container service. They do offer a suite of tools to manage the containerized applications from development to production but it is still barebones and they have their work cut out in making this offering more compelling as Amazon ECS or Google Container Engine.

I am glad to see Oracle talking about AI and Blockchains as a part of their modern stack and I am hoping that they have a production ready set of tools available by next OpenWorld.

Recommendations For Enterprise Decision Makers

If you are an Oracle Customer wanting to migrate your applications to the cloud, it makes complete sense to consider Oracle IaaS for your migration needs. However, this is recommended for the migration of existing applications than building any net new applications. They have limited set of services for building next gen applications. Wait for their offerings to mature before using Oracle cloud for newer applications.

If Oracle tech stack is not critical for your applications, AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud have a wide range of services needed for the modern applications. We strongly recommend these providers for your next gen applications at this point. Oracle can still evolve fast to compete with these providers by increasing the breadth and depth of their higher order services but they are not there yet.

Conclusion

In spite of their late start, Oracle has shown seriousness and commitment towards a more coherent cloud strategy. They still have a long way to go before they can catch up with their competitors. Right now, their IaaS is quite attractive for migrating existing applications built on Oracle stack because of the aggressive pricing but their cloud is not recommended for net new applications. This may change between now and next OracleWorld if they accelerate rapidly, either by building or acquiring companies, to offer higher order services. We will have to wait and see. Rishidot Research recommends enterprise decision makers to closely watch their roadmap for the next year before betting their strategy on Oracle Cloud.

Briefing Notes: Insight Engines Takes AI To Enterprise IT

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Insight Engines, the San Francisco based startup focused on making machine data actionable, announced the general availability of Cyber Security Investigator and, also, showcased how Amazon Alexa can be tapped to query from Cyber Security Investigator. In this note, we will do an analysis on this announcement.

Market Overview

AI in enterprise is relatively new. Even though enterprises are slowly embracing machine learning and other AI models to dig deeper into their customer data and make business decisions, there is very little progress in using AI to take advantage of machine data. There are plenty of analytics solutions that helps Operations teams optimize their decision making process. But the market is still in infancy when it comes to using ML to automagically do operations or use AI technologies like NLP to develop a better user experience for the machine data. Imagine how DevOps can be done more optimally if developers or even other stakeholders like business users can take advantage of NLP to interact directly with machine data. These are just beginning and we can’t imagine what AI can do to autonomic computing with our current understanding of the landscape.

SWOT Analysis

Strengths

  • Powerful NLP engine to handle machine data, add context and give customization options to users
  • Starting with Splunk data (with an investment from Splunk, of course) gives them an easy on ramp to enterprise IT
  • Their initial focus on Security will help them get the attention of IT decision makers
  • Autopilot feature that provides a more pro-active approach to security might serve as model for future autonomic computing platforms

Weakness

  • They are a startup pushing a newer technology in the enterprise market. The barrier to entry for startups in enterprise is high. However, their partnership with Splunk should help them
  • They provide on-premise deployments which makes it difficult for the learning engine to continuously improve. But they are tapping into the anonymized meta data to help the learning engines learn from user behaviors. This will work well with modern enterprises but they may have trouble convincing enterprises in highly regulated verticals. It is not a weakness for Insight Engines alone but for any company trying to build AI systems that can be deployed on-premises. To overcome this, Insight Engines, as a pioneer in this space, has to convince the customers to share their metadata with them. It is a potential weakness but also an opportunity for them to emerge as thought leaders

Opportunities

  • Insight Engines has the first mover advantage and they are attacking low hanging fruits (machine data and security) with a more powerful NLP engine. They can easily broaden their product portfolio going forward
  • As we embrace modern stacks with deeper and deeper levels of automation, ML and AI are going to be the next wave of innovation. The early innovations in this kind of autonomic IT will come around user interface and user experience. Insight Engines is well positioned to take advantage of the trend

Threats

  • Many established players collect lot of machine data (including Splunk) and it is a logical next step for them to attack the low hanging fruits like NLP for UI/UX. Though it is a threat, it is also an opportunity
  • Open source NLP engines can come and disrupt the market. OSS need not come from the traditional IT companies but also from end customers who develop ML and AI engines for their internal use. There is also an opportunity for Insight Engines to lead here but OSS by startups is not easy.

Conclusion

Insight Engines is an interesting startup in the up and coming field of AI in enterprise IT. It is too early in the market but offers potential opportunities for enterprises to do IT more optimally and optimize the use of human power in house by involving more stakeholders and by reducing the learning curve.

Virtual Panel: VMworld 2017 Recap

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Yesterday, we hosted a Virtual Panel on VMworld 2017 talking about the news that came out of VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas last week. The panelists are:

  • John Allwright, Pivotal Inc
  • Rob Bissett, Virtustream
  • Scott Fulton, The New Stack
  • Bryan Friedman, Pivotal Inc
  • Krishnan Subramanian, Rishidot Research (Moderator)

We discussed many topics ranging from the recent cloud announcements by VMware, Multi Cloud Strategy, Pivotal Container Service, Enterprise use of Kubernetes and whether BOSH can emerge as a standard for infrastructure services orchestration. Watch the video below.

 

 

Pivotal Container Service – A Quick Analysis

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Yesterday, at VMworld 2017, Pivotal Inc announced Pivotal Container Service and a partnership with Google for Hybrid Cloud. Pivotal Container Service (PKS) is made available based on Kubo project which integrates Kubernetes with BOSH. The infrastructure orchestration plane for CloudFoundry. Pivotal Container Service if the commercial offering for Kubo and the partnership with Google will allow customers of Pivotal Container Service to use a hybrid environment between VMware infrastructure inside the data center and Google Container Engine (GKE) on the public cloud.

What it means for Pivotal

Pivotal CloudFoundry (PCF) has gained good enterprise traction in the past several years (which is reflected, in some sense, on the revenue claims made by Pivotal for the past few years). However, the momentum around Docker containers since 2014 and the momentum around Kubernetes project in the past two years are adding pressure on Pivotal as they march towards their rumored IPO. Pivotal CloudFoundry platform got their traction in the market due to the developer centric approach they took in building their platform. Even though Kubernetes has its operational roots, some of the developer centric platform offerings in the Kubernetes ecosystem, like Red Hat’s OpenShift and others, is creating competition to PCF in the market. Based on our conversations with enterprise decision makers and our conversations with vendors, it is pretty evident that Pivotal sales teams face questions about Kubernetes as they go into the market. Clearly, Pivotal needs a response to the Kubernetes story.

One way to compete is to highlight the technical strength of CloudFoundry platform against Kubernetes and find a way to sell into enterprise accounts. But the momentum in Kubernetes is too strong for Pivotal to spend their sales cycles fighting Kubernetes. A smarter move is to support Kubernetes and add a layer of abstraction to hide its complexities. This is exactly what Pivotal is trying to achieve with this announcement. The key thing to notice here is BOSH as the glue to Kubernetes world (more about it later).

What it means to VMware

Ever since public clouds pulled the rug from underneath VMware, they are struggling with a credible public cloud story. Finally, they are narrowing down on a hybrid cloud story with a multi-cloud component. Moreover, containers are turning out to be an Achilles heel in VMware’s cloud playbook. The reality facing VMware is to have a credible story involving public cloud and containers. In spite of recent announcements in VMworld, they are far away from having a credible story on this front. With Pivotal’s investment in BOSH and VMware’s efforts to build a credible hybrid story in the multi-cloud world, there is an opportunity in front of them. They have started with a partnership with AWS where VMware’s Cloud Foundation is available for customers to use. Let us cut the slack here and call out the customers who will benefit from this partnership. They are the existing VMware customers wanting to go the AWS route without much of disruption. If VMware has to gain interest in new customers who are doubling down on the cloud, they need to go much beyond v-services on AWS and other public cloud providers. They need to make vSphere the orchestration plane for infrastructure services (be it public or private). Selling multi-cloud infrastructure services is difficult because of the user experience problem with multi-cloud infrastructure. This becomes even more damning when VMware is not one of the public cloud providers in this multi-cloud world. This is where Pivotal’s investment on BOSH comes handy. If Pivotal, through their application platform route, can make BOSH the standard for orchestrating infrastructure services in the multi-cloud world, VMware with their v-services as front end can stay as a credible player attracting newer customers focussed on digital transformation.

What it means to Kubernetes

To be blunt, nothing. Kubernetes community doesn’t care how the software is packaged. Whether it is VMware or Red Hat or AWS or Microsoft or any of the startups in the community, all they care is about having Kubernetes in more places. But I am long arguing that Kubernetes is the Google’s trojan horse in the enterprise to eventually get the enterprise workloads on Google Cloud. This strategy is nothing new to Google. They successfully used Chromecast as the trojan horse to gain market share in the home media room market. It is a similar gameplay with the enterprises. Google doesn’t care who takes Kubernetes into enterprise data centers. All they care is to provide an easy on-ramp to Google Cloud in their competition against AWS and Azure. This partnership with Pivotal provides them another opportunity.

What it means to Enterprise Customers

If you are a satisfied VMware shop, your IT modernization story runs through VMware and you are well-taken care off. If you are a Pivotal customer, you just put a check against Kubernetes in the Modern Enterprise checklist. If you are a customer wondering what is right for you, here are your choices:

  • If you are ok to outsource your infrastructure decisions to Pivotal/VMware, betting on Pivotal is the way to go
  • If you prefer Pivotal’s approach to application platform against, say, OpenShift, this will help you with multi-cloud strategy
  • If you are not sure, we strongly recommend you do the homework on the acquisition costs, lock-in costs, training costs, etc. to make a decision. There are other multi-cloud platforms available in the market

In short, Pivotal’s offering is a credible path to a digital transformation involving a multi-cloud story but it is important for you to decide if you want BOSH to be your multi-cloud orchestration engine.

Virtual Panel on VMworld: We are hosting a Virtual panel to discuss the announcements at VMworld on Tuesday, Sept 5th 2017 at 11 AM PST. You can watch it live here.

Abstractions In The Multi-Cloud World

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Picture Courtesy: Rackspace

Information Technology is always focussed on abstractions as a way to remove complexity and simplify IT use for end users. IT evolution can be directly correlated to the quest to abstract at higher layers. Whether it is an evolution from binary programming to programming in higher level languages or virtualizing the servers for operations efficiencies or an evolution from IaaS to PaaS for developer productivity, the quest to abstract away complexity, at times at a cost of losing some flexibility, has been the path of IT evolution. In this post, I will talk about how abstractions play a role in the multi-cloud world.

Abstraction & Operational Efficiencies

Starting with server virtualization, the focus is on using the software on top of physical infrastructure to remove operational complexities and provide a managementplane for operations staff to operate at scale. Cloud computing took it to the next level by removing the bottleneck in provisioning, thereby improving developer productivity along with operational and resource efficiencies. Beyond compute, SDN and NFV helped abstract physical networks and made them programmable. Software Defined Storage decoupled the underlying physical storage from the end users and making it easy for developers to access storage.

Multi-Cloud brings in certain additional operational complexities to users but there are various efforts going on to help reduce operations pain. Cloud management offerings remove significant operational pains with Multi-Cloud by bringing a control plane between the user and the underlying clouds. Projects like BOSH from CloudFoundry are also attempting to simplify the complexity associated with Multi-Cloud.

Abstraction & Developer Productivity

We have always seen developer focussed abstraction bringing in increased productivity and agility in the software delivery process. Whether it is the evolution of higher level languages in the early days of computing or a platform abstraction encapsulating runtimes and libraries or PaaS. improving the developer productivity has always been a key driving point for IT. Platform as a Service offerings like Heroku, Engine Yard, CloudFoundry and OpenShift enabled abstraction at a level above infrastructure, encapsulating various runtimes, middleware and developer services along with infrastructure, and giving the developers an API to push their application code. Everything else happened automagically and this approach to an abstraction on top of compute helped organizations maximize both operational efficiencies and developer productivity.

Let us now look at how abstractions help developers in the multi-cloud world. With platforms like OpenShift (or other Kubernetes based platforms) and CloudFoundry, organizations can take advantage of multi-cloud while giving the developers the same interface to push their applications. These platforms bring a level of simplicity while also providing a seamless portability of applications as these platforms can be deployed in multiple clouds and also on premise. Portability of the platforms across clouds along with a standardized API that abstracts the compute in a multi-cloud scenario is a no-brainer for any Modern Enterprise. Projects like Kubernetes and CloudFoundry are leading the way in providing this flexibility to developers in a multi-cloud world without having to learn about their services and the associated APIs. Since every application has a touch point with the compute, this abstraction over compute helps increase developer productivity in a multi-cloud scenario.

Most applications have a touch point with storage and, in a multi-cloud world where storage offered by various cloud providers are different, an abstraction offering a standardized API is essential. S3 defined a standard for object storage in AWS cloud but there are no S3 alternatives available for other clouds. Minio brings in an abstraction, running natively on all the cloud providers on top of their storage offerings and providing an S3 like API for developers.

Among the three key infrastructure components, compute, storage and network, very few applications have a touch point with the network. Gaming or streaming applications needing multicast setup or other niche applications requiring access to load balancers or other infrastructure components are the types of applications that require access to the networking layer. Some of the legacy applications that are forklifted to the cloud will also require access to the network. SDN offerings like OpenContrail or VMware’s NSX which also includes assets from NFV player Nicira which they acquired are perfect examples of abstractions which allow developers a simplified interface without worrying about the complexities of the underlying physical networks. For most other applications, a platform abstraction like CloudFoundry or Kubernetes can encapsulate the (virtual) networking layer and remove network entirely from the “field of view” of the developers.

In a nutshell

The abstractions are critical in a multi-cloud world to maximize developer productivity and keep the business agility unimpacted by the complexities of multi-cloud. If you are an enterprise customer planning a multi-cloud strategy, figuring out the right developer abstraction, along with the right operations management layer is going to be critical.

Disclaimer: Minio is a client of Rishidot Research

Microsoft Joins CloudFoundry Foundation – A Quick Take

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Yesterday, Microsoft announced that they are joining CloudFoundry Foundation as a gold member. Here is my quick analysis of this news. This is expected ever since we saw blog posts talking about deploying CloudFoundry on Azure. Now it is official.

What does it mean for CloudFoundry Foundation?

Anytime a big company joins anOSS Foundation, it is a shot in the arm for the foundation as it helps them in terms of cash and credibility. In the case of CloudFoundry Foundation, this is even more important because they are trying to fend off the perception that CF Project is dominated by Pivotal (obviously as Pivotal makes the most money out of CloudFoundry). Having Microsoft as a part of their Foundation will help. With companies like HPE going off the CloudFoundry radar, CloudFoundry Foundation can manage the loss.

What does it mean for Microsoft?

Microsoft is positioning Azure as the best infrastructure to run any app on any deployment platform. As a part of this strategy, Microsoft has been publicizing blog posts on how to run CloudFoundry, Kubernetes and Mesos on Azure. They have invested in Mesosphere, the company behind Mesos OSS project and they are part of the CNCF and acquired a company to need up their Kubernetes credentials. The only missing piece was CloudFoundry Foundation. By joining the CF Foundation, they are signaling that they are serious about CloudFoundry support on Azure.

What does it mean for customers?

Customers can now get the confidence that if they go with CloudFoundry on Azure, they can be confident that it will work seamlessly. In order to make CloudFoundry a first class citizen on Azure, Microsoft has to work closely with the CloudFoundry community and this is a key first step towards that. Now it is critical for Microsoft to put their engineers in the project to ensure that they are able to influence the project to suit the needs of Microsoft customers.

In a nutshell

Microsoft joining CloudFoundry foundation signals their commitment to the project. It should give confidence to their customers to use CloudFoundry on Azure. It will be interesting to watch the progress. I am hoping to hear from Microsoft on how their customers are using CloudFoundry at scale in their conference next year.

Disclaimer: CloudFoundry Foundation took care of my travel

Multi-Cloud Is Inevitable

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Picture Credit: Rackspace

In the early days of cloud computing, I was hoping for a more federated model of cloud providers because of my strong belief that oligarchy of cloud providers is bad for customers. I was hoping that open source infrastructure software like OpenStack, CloudStack, etc will lower the barrier for service providers to compete with Amazon Web Services (AWS). For reasons beyond the scope of this blog post, it didn’t happen and AWS gained a significant lead in the IaaS market. But the last two years are reshaping the cloud computing market. With an aggressive push from Microsoft and Google, along with public cloud initiatives of Oracle and IBM, we are beginning to see a Multi Cloud world.

Has Amazon slowed down?

Not at all. Rather, they are doubling up on their cloud push. It can be seen from the new services they offer every year (especially during the re:invent conference) and their aggressive hiring. Amazon has been setting trends in the market. Whether it is easy to use object storage like S3 or powerful database services or the newer AWS Lambda based Functions as a Service, AWS has been plowing ahead in full speed. But what has changed is the speed with which other cloud providers are executing. A multi cloud marketplace is starting to emerge.

What changed?

First, and foremost, the competitors to AWS started executing well. Not only Microsoft and Google made their cloud easily consumable, they started beefing up the number of powerful higher order services available to their cloud customers. Examples include Google Spanner and Microsoft CosmosDB. But, more importantly, platforms like CloudFoundry and Kubernetes made it easy to use multiple cloud providers with an abstraction on top of the infrastructure. They removed the friction in multi cloud use cases.

When you combine these developments with the fact that the enterprise cloud market is only starting to shape up, the market is still wide open for all the cloud providers. Since the user experience with multi-cloud is also becoming more and more seamless, we will be seeing a future where multi cloud will be the norm.

What about the Hybrid cloud?

Hybrid Cloud is a different beast that helps apps bridge between the data center and public cloud. The use cases are different. Disaster Recovery, Cloud Bursting, BiModal approach to applications are the right use cases for Hybrid cloud. With multi-cloud, one can go all in with cloud native applications but with different cloud providers. One major trend I am seeing with organizations embracing multi cloud is about using different cloud providers for different workloads, driven mainly by the strengths of cloud providers offering services. For example, many organizations are considering Google cloud for big data and machine learning applications while they use their web applications using MySQL at AWS. Unlike the Hybrid cloud trend, the multi cloud trend is driven mainly by which cloud is better suited for a specific kind of application.

Summing Up

The multi cloud is real and the trend is driven by the varied strengths of cloud providers based on the higher order services they offer and the ability to right size the infrastructure resources. But one of the key factors for organizations to watch out in the multi cloud world is about how they manage their data. The one who controls the destiny of their data will emerge successfully in the multi cloud world.

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