If you missed my day 3, you can view it here.
Keynote: What’s New and Next for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
The day started with the keynote from Clay Magouyrk, Executive Vice President of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Oracle.
Demanding workloads
Highest Security
Performance and efficiency
How the OCI Public Cloud is growing:
105 services
260 features launched in the last year
103% year on year consumption growth
‘OCI is great for Oracle workloads’, but also ‘OCI is great for all workloads’.
Next Kelsey Szot, Co-Founder and Product Lead at Adept came to stage. She discussed Machine Learning with Clay and explain how models for Machine Learning are trained as task specific models. However, now with vast amount of GPU in OCI, this allows for the scale of compute for foundation models. Where they are trained on large scale of data on the internet and then given the specific data, and these model can outperform the task specific models. So rather then many task specific models, we can have generic foundation models. She believed in the future, writing code from human to compute language will be automatically translated with Machine Learning.
After this, Clay then talked about:
Serverless Kubernetes, Container Instances
GPU Super Clusters
MongoDB compatibility in the Oracle database
MySQL HeatWave LakeHouse
PostgreSQL Aries
Privacy Assurance
He then went onto, how Public Cloud is great, it gives you:
Faster innovation
Elasticity
Scalability
Global reach
However despite this, Public Cloud adoption in the last 15 years is only 32% compared to Smart Phone, which has a 91% adoption!
Why is this? Well because it can be complicated:
Data residency, security, and privacy
Latency and performance
Regulatory compliance
Expensive to migrate
Expensive to run
Then went onto explain how right cloud partner can make it much simpler
He then went onto explain how customers want the ‘best in breed’ and therefore customer will not just use a single Public Cloud provider but multiple. And how multi-cloud is going to become the norm, therefore with Oracle are making it so ‘You can easily integrate with other clouds’.
He then went onto ‘You can get full functionality where you need it’ and how OCI Dedicated Region is now only 12 racks. ‘You’ve got Public Cloud right where you want it’ with starting commitment of $1M per year.
Next Scott Petty, Chief Digital & IT Officer at Vodafone comes to the stage.
He spoke about how Vodafone is optimising, providing digital offerings and building a scale platform. They have a Cloud First strategy and are upgrading/modernising ‘legacy’ mission critical systems. They have approximately 6,000 databases, and have opted for 6 OCI dedicated regions, of which 1 has already gone live. They are migrating 6 databases per day to the new platform and decommissioning the old kit that no longer needed as they go.
Clay next spoke about Oracle Alloy, one of the significant announcements from Oracle CloudWorld, which is basically Oracle’s Cloud @ Customer but allows Oracle partners to become Cloud providers themselves and offer services built on OCI to their customers. The Oracle partner can set their own pricing, add IP, branding, etc. More information can be seen in the announcement here.
Next he explained how 82% of large enterprises use multiple Clouds, 27% increase from last year. Then proceeded to updated us all on the OCI Azure Interconnect, how it’s in 12 regions with 300+ customers with 2ms latency. Next spoke about the more recent service of Oracle Database Service for Azure, with streamline experience, federated identity and low latency. Following this spoke about MySQL on HeatWave on AWS, how it massively accelerated queries, allowed for OLTP and analytics in one and zero app changes required. HeatWave is a in-memory layer on top MySQL, more info here. He advised MySQL HeatWave will also be available in Azure in November 2022. Next Sudha Raghavan, Vice President, Trust, Observability, and Privacy at Oracle demonstrated MySQL on HeatWave on AWS.
Finally Clay ended with how Oracle wanted to connect their services with other clouds, combine other’s services with OCI and finally want to improve the interoperability between clouds. Closing remarks were that OCI ‘A robust cloud’, ‘Where you need it’ and That works well with others’, ‘That’s the future of cloud’.
Is It Possible to Scale Memory with Less DRAM?
After the keynote I headed to a session by John Hubbard, Cloud Solution Architect at Intel.
Who talked about how tiered memory architecture can be used to expand memory capacity, whilst still have high performance and low TCO. Have same memory for less or double memory for same cost.
Explained how “active” memory is the consumed memory that is frequently in use, where as not all consumed memory is not active but “locked”. His presentation was in the context of VMware vSphere, so these would be Virtual Machines (VMs) that are hogging memory from the host memory.
Explaining how keeping “active” memory in DRAM with the rest of consumed in Persistent Memory (PMEM) is best use case.
Currently PMEM goes in the memory slots in the server, however in the future they could go on PCI via CXL interface.
Closed with tiered memory can give the balance of the best of today’s memory of DDR DRAM and PMEM, most workloads if “active” memory fits within DRAM can benefit with minimal impact.
Oracle Ace Lounge
Before the next keynote, I volunteered to help out at the Oracle Ace Lounge for an hour. On my visit to the Oracle Ace Lounge I went past the Premier League trophy and had to have a photo taken 😎
Always great to meet other Oracle Aces
I then spent an hour at the Oracle Ace Lounge with Abigail, Ron, Kayla and Jennifer, waiting for Oracle Aces to collect their Ace Swag as you can see below:
After this was the Oracle Ace chocolate tasting, which has become a tradition now. Jennifer and Opal on duty.
What’s New and Next for Oracle Fusion Applications
Final keynote was presented by Steve Miranda, Executive Vice President, Applications Development, Oracle. All companies are finding it tricky to navigate an uncertain world, Oracle is therefore pivoting and changing to address new needs and demands. He said “The companies and individuals that embraced change came out better”, “There’s one thing for certain, things will change and the speed of change is only going to get faster and faster”. To help with this, Oracle B2B Commerce launched in partnership with JP Morgan. B2B commerce requires too many steps and processes to complete, Steve said “We’re going to change how all that works”, showing that the changes can be done quicker and more easier.
Takis Georgakopoulos, Global Head of Payments at J.P. Morgan spoke about integrated payment systems with FexEx offering integrated logistics services.
He next spoke about how Fusion Applications solves today’s challenges, by offering nearly everything that your business might need how Oracle is 100% focused on your success.
How it’s build on next generation Cloud Infrastructure.
He next showed how recognisable brand across the global use Oracle Fusion Applications in financial, digital, gaming, grocery, etc.
Next Javier Echave, Chief Financial Officer, Heathrow Airport comes to stage. Heathrow partners with 80 airlines and works with around 400 companies, thus requires technology systems that are malleable and resilient says Javier. He then likened to the iconic quote from spider man “with great power comes great responsibility” as he gives Steve a spider man teddy. Luckily Oracle Fusion Applications offers the support Heathrow needs.
Steve final guest was Jeanine Carlucci, Head of Employee Digital & Service Experience at JP Morgan Chase & Co. She explained she looked after 300K employees across 70 countries, and how 60 different platforms were brought down to just 1, using a whole range of Oracle Services making the Employee Digital and Service Experience much better.
Finally Steve wrapped up with summary of Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications and thanked us all for coming and hopes Oracle can be the key to help all its customers succeed.
Oracle Ace Dinner
After the final keynote, I went back to the Oracle Ace Lounge to kill some time with fellow Oracle Aces. Before finally walking over to the Canaletto Ristorante Veneto, overlooking the Grand Canal at The Venetian Resort, for a private dinner event for Oracle Aces hosted by Oracle Database Product Management.
Prior to sitting down, we had the customary Oracle Ace photo, although you might struggle to spot me 🤦🏽♂️
Food on the menu looked good 😋
Gerald kicked off the Oracle Ace Dinner, by welcoming us all and then introduced Juan, Executive Vice President, Mission Critical Database Technologies who thanks us all.
I’m a fan of Juan as he tends to do all the key/new announcements on Exadata, so I follow him keenly and it was a pleasure to meet him and get chance to speak.
Also got to meet Marc from dbi services, who I spent most of the dinner and evening talking to 😂
Oracle CloudWorld Party
After the Oracle Ace Dinner, we all walked to the Oracle CloudWorld party, which this year was a bit lowkey compared to the past Treasure Island and Chase Center, but then again CloudWorld was much smaller then past OpenWorlds. Oracle along with all conferences globally are suffer post Covid 😥
Nevertheless the party was decent, it was Cloud and Unicorn themed I guess due to CloudWorld and Steve Miller Band who were performing at the party, sponsored by Intel.
Tomorrow will be day 3 of the conference, the last day of the Oracle CloudWorld 🙁
Sorry it’s taken long to get this post up, it’s taken several hours over several days 🤦🏽♂️. Hopefully have the final days out over next coming days.
You can view my day 5 here.
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Thanks
Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)
