 We'll go back to SuperCloud 22, hashtag SuperCloud 22. This is Dave Vellante in 2019, Oracle and Microsoft announced a collaboration to bring interoperability between OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Azure Clouds. It was Oracle's initial foray into so-called multi-cloud and we're joined by Karan Bhatt, who's the Vice President for Product Management at OCI and Chris Rice is the Vice President of Software Development at Oracle Database. And we're going to talk about how this technology is evolving and whether it fits our view of what we call SuperCloud. Welcome gentlemen, thank you. Thanks for having us. So you recently, just last month announced a new service that extends on the initial partnership with Microsoft, Oracle Interconnect with Azure. And you refer to this as a secure private link between the two clouds across 11 regions around the world, under two milliseconds, data transmission, sounds pretty cool, it enables customers to run Microsoft applications against data stored in Oracle databases without any loss in efficiency or presumably performance. So we use this term SuperCloud to describe a service or sets of services built on hyperscale infrastructure that leverages the core primitives and APIs of an individual cloud platform but abstracts that underlying complexity to create a continuous experience across more than one cloud. Is that what you've done? Absolutely. I think it starts at the top layer in terms of just making things very simple for the customer. I think at the end of the day, we want to enable true workloads running across two different clouds where you're potentially running maybe the app layer in one and the database layer at the back and another. And the integration I think starts with making it ease of use, right? So you can start with things like, okay, can you log into your second or your third cloud with the first cloud providers credentials? Can you make calls against another cloud using another cloud's APIs? Can you peer the networks together? Can you make it seamless? I think those are all the components that are sort of, they're kind of the ingredients to making a multi-cloud or super cloud experience successful. Thank you for that, Karen. So I guess the question for Chris is, trying to understand what you're really solving for? What specific customer problems are you focused on? What's the service optimized for? Presumably it's database, but maybe you could double click on that. Sure. So I mean, of course it's database. So it's a super fast network so that we can split the workload across two different clouds, leveraging the best from both. But above the networking, what we had to do is we had to think about what a true multi-cloud or what you're calling super cloud experience would be. It's more than just making the network bytes flow. So what we did is we took a look as Karen hinted at, right? Is where is my identity? Where is my observability? How do I connect these things across? How it feels native to that other cloud. So what kind of engineering do you have to do to make that work? It's not just plugging stuff together, but maybe you could explain a little bit more detail, the resources that you had to bring to bear and the technology behind the architecture. Sure. I think it starts with actually what our goal was, right? Our goal was to actually provide customers with a fully managed experience. What that means is we had to basically create a brand new service. So we have obviously an Azure-like portal and an experience that allows customers to do this, but under the covers, we actually have a fully managed service that manages the networking layer, the physical infrastructure, and it actually calls APIs on both sides of the fence. It actually manages your Azure resources, creates them, but it also interacts with OCI at the same time. And under the covers, this service actually takes Azure primitives as inputs. And then it sort of like, essentially translates them to OCI action. So we actually truly integrated this as a service that's essentially built as a pass layer on top of these two clouds. So the customer doesn't really care or know, maybe they know, because they might be coming through an Azure experience, but you can run work on either Azure and or OCI, and it's a common experience across those clouds. Is that correct? That's correct. So like you said, the customer does know, they know there is a relationship with both clouds, but thanks to all the things we've built, there's this thing we invented, we created called a multi-cloud control plane. This control plane does operate against both clouds at the same time to make it as seamless as possible so that maybe they don't notice. The power of the interconnect is extremely fast networking, as fast as what we could see inside a single cloud if you think about how big a data center might be from edge to edge in that cloud. Going across the interconnect makes it so that that workload is not important that it's spanning two clouds anymore. So you say extremely fast networking. I remember I used to, I wrote a piece a long time ago, Larry Ellison loves InfiniBand. I presume we've moved on from them, but maybe not. What is that interconnect? Yeah, so it's funny you mentioned interconnect. My previous history comes from HBC where we actually inside OCI today, we moved from InfiniBand as this part of Exadata's core to what we call Rocky V2. So that's just another RDMA network. We actually use it very successfully, not just for Exadata, but we use it for our standard computers that we provide to high-performance computing customers. And the multi-cloud control plane runs, where does that live? Does it live on OCI? Does it live on Azure? Yes. So it does. It lives on our side, our side of the house, as part, great as part of our Oracle OCI control plane. And it is the veneer that makes these two clouds possible so that we can wire them together. So it knows how to take those Azure primitives and the OCI primitives and wire them at the appropriate levels together. Now, I want to talk about this PAS layer. Part of SuperCloud, we said to actually make it work, you're going to have to have a SuperPAS. I know we're taking this term a little far, but it's instructive in that what we surmised was you're probably not going to just use off-the-shelf, plain old vanilla PAS. You're actually going to have a purpose-built PAS to solve for the specific problem. So as an example, if you're solving for ultra-low latency, which I think you're doing, you're probably no offense to my friends at Red Hat, but you're probably not going to develop this on OpenShift. But tell us about that PAS layer or what we call the SuperPAS layer. Go ahead, Chris. Well, so you're right, we weren't going to build it out on OpenShift. So we have Oracle OCI, the standard is Terraform. So the backend of everything we do is based around Terraform. Today, what we've done is we've built that control plane and it will be API drivable. It will be drivable from the UI and it will let people operate and create primitives across both sides. So you can, you mentioned developers. Developers love automation, right? Because it makes our lives easy. We will be able to automate a multi-cloud workload from ground up, config is code these days. So we can config an entire multi-cloud experience from one place. So double-click, Chris, on that developer experience. What is that like? They're using the same tool set irrespective of which cloud we're running on and it's specific to this service or is it more generic across other Oracle services? There's two parts to that. So one is the, we've only onboarded a portion so the database portfolio and other services will be coming into this multi-cloud. For the majority of Oracle Cloud, the automation, the config layer is based on Terraform. So using Terraform, anyone can configure everything from a mid-tier to an exadata all the way soup to nuts from smallest thing possible to the largest. What we've not done yet is integrated truly with the Azure API from command line drivable. That is coming in the future. It will be, it is on the roadmap, it is coming. Then they could get into one tool but right now they would have half their automation for the multi-cloud config on the Azure tool set and half on the OCI tool set. But we're not crazy saying from a roadmap standpoint that will provide some benefit to developers and is a reasonable direction for the industry generally but Oracle and Microsoft specifically. Absolutely, I'm a developer at heart and so one of the things we want to make sure is that developers' lives are as easy as possible. And is there a metadata management layer or intelligence that you've built in to optimize for performance or low latency or cost across the respective clouds? Yeah, definitely. I think latency is going to be an important factor. The service that we've initially built isn't going to serve the sort of the tens of microseconds but most applications that are sort of in running on top of the enterprise applications that are running on top of the database are in the several millisecond range. And we've actually done a lot of work on the networking pairing side to make sure that when we launch these resources across the two clouds, we actually pick the right child site. We pick the right region and we pick the right availability zone or domain. So we actually do the due diligence under the cover so the customer doesn't have to do the trial and error and try to find the right latency range. And this is actually one of the big reasons why we only launched the service on the interconnect regions. Even though we have close to, I think close to 40 regions at this point at OCI, this service is only built for the regions that we have an interconnect relationship with Microsoft. Okay, so you started with Microsoft in 2019, you're going deeper now in that relationship. Is there any reason that you couldn't, I mean, technically, what would you have to do to go to other clouds? You just, you talked about understanding the primitives and leveraging the primitives of Azure, presumably if you wanted to do this with AWS or Google or Alibaba, you would have to do similar engineering work. Is that correct or does what you've developed just going to pour it over to any cloud? Yeah, that's absolutely correct, Dave. I think, you know, Chris talked a lot about kind of the multi-cloud control plane, right? That's essentially the control plane that goes and does stuff on other clouds. We would have to essentially go and build that level of integration into the other clouds. And I think, you know, as we get more popularity and as more products come online through these services, I think we'll listen to what customers want, whether it's, you know, maybe it's the other way around too, Dave. Maybe it's the fact that they want to use Oracle Cloud, but they want to use other complimentary services within Oracle Cloud. So I think it can go both ways. I think, you know, kind of the market and the customer base will dictate that. Yeah, so if I understand that correctly, somebody from another cloud, Google Cloud could say, hey, we actually want to run this service on OCI because we want to expand our market. And if TK gets together with his old friends and figures that out, but we're just, you know, hypothesizing here. But like you said, it can go both ways. And then I have another question related to that. So you, multi-clouds, okay, great, super cloud. How about the edge? Do you ever see a day where that becomes part of the equation? Certainly the near edge would, you know, a Home Depot or a Lowe's store or a bank. But what about like the far edge, the tiny edge? Can you talk about the edge and where that fits in your vision? Yeah, absolutely. I think edge is a, interestingly, it's getting fuzzier and fuzzier day by day. I think the term, you know, we obviously every cloud has their own sort of philosophy in what edge is, right? We have a, you know, it starts from, you know, if you do want to do far edge, you know, we have devices like red devices, which is our ruggedized servers that talk back to our control plane and OCI. You can deploy those things on like, you know, into war zones and things like that underground. But then we also have things like clouded customer, where customers can actually deploy components of our infrastructure like compute or exadata into a facility where they only need that certain capability. And then a few years ago, we launched, you know, what's now called a dedicated region. And that actually is a different take on edge in some sense, where you get the entire capability of our public commercial region, but within your facility. So imagine if a customer was to essentially point to, you know, point a finger on a commercial map and say, hey, look, that region is just mine. Essentially that's the capability that we're providing to our customers where if you have a white space, if you have a facility, if you're exiting out of your data center space, you could essentially place an OCI region within your confines behind your firewall. And then you could interconnect that to a cloud provider if you wanted to and get the same multi-cloud capability that you get in a commercial region. So we have all the spectrums of possibilities there. Guys, super interesting discussion. It's very clear to us that the next 10 years of cloud ain't going to be like the last 10. There's a whole new layer developing. Data is a big key to that. We see industries getting involved. We obviously didn't get into the Oracle Cerner acquisitions, a little too early for that, but we've actually predicted that companies like Cerner and you've seen it with Goldman Sachs and Capital One, they're actually building services on the cloud. So this is a really exciting new area and we really appreciate you guys coming on the SuperCloud 22 event and sharing your insights. Thanks for your time. Thanks for your time. Okay, keep it right there. Hashtag SuperCloud 22. We'll be right back with more great content right after this short break.