On the 5th of June 2019, both Oracle and Microsoft made a joint announcement on the interconnection between Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure:

Oracle’s Press Release
Microsoft Press Release

The key aspects of the announcement are:

1. A direct interconnect between Oracle Cloud and Azure Cloud, starting in Oracle’s Ashburn (North America) region and Azure Washington DC (US East) region, with plans to expand additional regions in the future*.
2. Unified identity and access management, via a unified single sign-on experience to manage resources across both Oracle Cloud and Azure.
3. Supported deployment of custom applications and packaged Oracle applications (such as JD Edwards, PeopleSoft and E-Business Suite typically referred to as Oracle Applications Unlimited) in Azure Cloud with the Oracle databases (such as RAC, Exadata, Autonomous Database) deployed in the Oracle Cloud.
4. A collaborative support model for customers leveraging these new capabilities.

*With only one region available in both Oracle and Azure, this will allow for failure in a Availability Domain in Oracle Cloud and/or Availability Zone in Azure Cloud but not a failure of a whole region in either.  So until more regions are added, Disaster Recover will be limited to Availability Domains/Availability Zones:

Figure 4 from Oracle’s blog “Overview of the Interconnect Between Oracle and Microsoft“.

What does this mean?

In a nutshell, for those customers who have Microsoft Azure as their Cloud platform of choice, can now migrate their application tier to Microsoft Azure, whilst migrating the database tier i.e. Oracle database (mandatory for Application Unlimited) without having to worry about the all important latency (high-throughput, low-latency as stated in Oracle’s blog post).  It is however unclear if there will be any charge for outbound/inbound traffic between the clouds, but it does seem from the documentation and blog post that both Oracle’s dedicated FastConnect and Azure’s dedicated ExpressRoute are required, which are both fix rate products.  It also helps those customers who require the favourable database licensing on the Oracle Cloud, more info can be found in my blog post here.

This is certainly a step towards the trend of multi-cloud/hybird-cloud platforms.

More info can be found regarding this announcement from our Version 1’s blog post here.

Another interesting read from SearchCloud Computing in regards to this announcement.

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Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)