Infrastructure

Oracle Cloud Strategy – An Analysis

Krishnan Subramanian · October 9, 2017 · Leave a Comment

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.

Pivotal Container Service – A Quick Analysis

Krishnan Subramanian · August 30, 2017 · Leave a Comment

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.

Multi-Cloud Is Inevitable

Krishnan Subramanian · June 6, 2017 · Leave a Comment

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.

Meet The Vendor: Parallels

Krishnan Subramanian · February 8, 2013 · Leave a Comment

Recently, I attended the Parallels Summit 2013 at Las Vegas. During the summit, myself and Alex Williams of Techcrunch had a chance to interview the CEO of Parallels, Birger Steen and talk about the SMB infrastructure market, Parallels cloud strategy and what he expects in the future. We also talked about the application packaging standard APS 2.0 developed by Parallels and its impact in the market. Please watch the video below.

Disclosure: Parallels paid for the travel and stay of Rishidot Research analyst Krishnan Subramanian and Alex Williams

Anuta Networks Unveils its nCloudX Platform

lmacvittie · January 22, 2013 · Leave a Comment

Anuta Networks unveils a solution to more effectively manage cloud and SDN-enabled networks

Anuta Networks, a Silicon Valley-based self-proclaimed "network services virtualization" startup, is entering the market with its inaugural offering, the Anuta nCloudX Platform.

The solution essentially provides network service abstraction and orchestration for cloud service providers and large enterprises engaged in the implementation of private clouds.

Anuta says of its initial offering:

The breakthrough Anuta Networks nCloudX platform simplifies and automates the complete lifecycle of network services in complex, heterogeneous networks across multi-vendor, multi-device, multi-protocol, and multi-hypervisor offerings for physical and virtual devices in both private cloud and public cloud deployments. The solution reduces network services delivery time from weeks to a few hours, building efficient software automation on top of a combination of both the existing hardware-controlled networks and the new generation of SDN technologies.

One of the concerns with regard to potential SDN adoption is, of course, the potential requirement to overhaul the entire network. Many SDN solutions today are highly disruptive, which may result in a more than tepid welcome in established data centers.

Solutions such as Anuta’s nCloudX Platform, however, aim to alleviate the pain-points associated with managing data centers comprised of multiple technologies and platforms by abstracting services from legacy and programmable network devices. The platform then provides integration points with Cloud Management Platforms and SDN controllers to enable implementation of more comprehensive cloud and data center orchestration flows.

Anuta’s nCloudX Platform follows the popular "class of provisioning" and "cataloging" schemes prevalent in Cloud Management Platform offerings and adds drag-and-drop topological design capabilities to assist in designing flexible, virtual networks from top to bottom. Its integration with OpenStack takes the form of a Quantum plug-in, essentially taking over the duties of multiple Quantum plug-ins for legacy and programmable devices. Given the pace at which support for many network devices in Quantum is occurring, alternative methods of integration may provide early adopters with more complete options for implementation.

Its ability to integrate with SDN controllers from Nicira (VMware) and Big Switch Networks enable organizations to pursue a transitory, hybrid strategy with respect to SDN, minimizing potential disruption and providing a clear migration path toward virtualized networks. Its cataloging and design services enable rapid on-boarding of new tenants and a simpler means of designing what are otherwise complex, virtualized networks.

While much of Anuta Networks’ focus lies on cloud, its ability to virtualize network services is likely to provide value to organizations seeking to automate its network provisioning and management systems, regardless of their adoption of cloud or SDN-related technologies.

Anuta Networks was founded by Chandu Guntakala, President & CEO, Srini Beereddy, CTO, and Praveen Vengalam, Vice President of Engineering, Anuta Networks. It focuses on the delivery of network services virtualization in the context of cloud and SDN-related architectures.