San Francisco, Sep 17
Taking on arch rival Amazon Web Services (AWS) in his usual style, Oracle Co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison has made a strong pitch for company's autonomous strategy with the availability of Oracle Autonomous Linux -- the first and only autonomous operating environment that eliminates complexity and human error to deliver cost savings, security and availability for customers.
Oracle also announced "Cloud Free Tier", including new "Always Free" services for anyone to try the world's first self-driving database and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for an unlimited time.
"Autonomous systems eliminate human labour. And by eliminating human error, you eliminate pilot error. We spend much more on people than we do on storage, on compute, or any of our physical assets. Resource sharing is on top of the savings of human labour," Ellison told the packed house as he kicked off the annual "Oracle OpenWorld" conference here on Monday.
"Amazon takes a very reasonable position and says that if you misconfigure your system, that's your mistake. As a customer you maintain full control of your content and responsibility for configuring access to AWS services. That's on you.
"When you use the Oracle Autonomous Database, it configures itself. It's not possible for customers to make configuration errors, because there are no pilots to make errors. The system configures itself," said the Oracle CTO, taking a dig at AWS, the Cloud arm of retail behemoth Amazon.
Ellison continued: "So in the Amazon Cloud if you make an error and it leads to a catastrophic data loss, that's on you. In the Oracle Cloud if you use the Autonomous Database, human beings are not involved, there can be no human error. The system is responsible for preventing data loss. Not you. Us."
Oracle and AWS has been at loggerheads for quite some time and AWS has offloaded Oracle as its Cloud vendor and would soon be 100 per cent reliable without the need of hosting Amazon workloads on Oracle Cloud.
In June, in a rather unusual arrangement, Cloud rivals Microsoft and Oracle announced an interoperability partnership enabling customers to migrate and run mission-critical enterprise workloads across Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.
The move was seen as an effort by Oracle to offset losses in the fierce competition coming its way from AWS and Google Cloud.
At the "Oracle OpenWorld", the company also introduced "Oracle OS Management Service", a highly available Oracle Cloud Infrastructure component that delivers control and visibility over systems whether they run Autonomous Linux, Linux or Windows.
It can be further automated with other Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services like auto-scaling as workloads need to grow or shrink to meet elastic demand.
"Oracle Autonomous Linux builds on Oracle's proven history of delivering Linux with extreme performance, reliability, and security to run the most demanding enterprise applications," said Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president of operating systems and virtualization engineering, Oracle.
While other hyperscale cloud vendors provide a free 12-month trial of their relational database and then start charging, Oracle's "Always Free Autonomous Database" remains free for as long as it is used.
"Always Free" services are available in all regions of the world and are available to anyone, including those with paid accounts, the company announced.
Oracle's "Free Tier" programme has two components: "Always Free" services, which provide access to Oracle Cloud services for an unlimited time and "Free Trial" which provides $300 in credits for 30 days to try additional services and larger shapes.
According to Ellison, servers fail, storage fail and even networks fail.
"Lots of things fail. The Oracle Autonomous Database not only eliminates human errors, but it's configured in such a way that the memory can fail and the system keeps running. A server fails and the system keeps running, you're not even aware of it," the Oracle CTO told the gathering.
Oracle is organising its flagship "OpenWorld" without its CEO Mark Hurd who took leave of absence last week to focus on his health.
Hurd has been a chief executive of the company since 2010. He is, however not the only CEO of the company. Oracle has Safra Catz as another CEO.
