Oracle Cloud Infrastructure - Ray Kalmbach VMware Explore 2022
Transcript
>> Welcome to VMWare Explore 2022 with the CTO Advisor Studio. Come on in and consume some content. >> Welcome back to the CTO Advisor CTO Studio coverage of VMWare Explore 2022. Again, I promise that we will have amazing conversations, whether they're sponsored, such as this one with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or unsponsored. We're talking to builders, maintainers, operators about the challenges modern IT shops face as they're migrating from private data centers into the public cloud. I'm joined today with first-time CTO Advisor Studio guest, but no stranger to CTO Advisor content, Ray Kalbach- >> Absolutely.
>> master solutions architect. >> Thank you very much, Keith. >> With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you. I'm glad to be here. >> Great. Great to meet you in person. We're going to get right at it. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is, whether you call it the third or fourth biggest cloud, kind of irrelevant. I have at least four options, and if you count the fifth biggest cloud, five options to move my enterprise operations to.
What's the money shot? Why Oracle Cloud Infrastructure? >> So Keith, you know, I was an engineer and architect for 25 plus years before I joined the vendor side. And for me, it's all about security. I come from a very security-centered background: credit card industry, financial industry, Department of Defense, things of that sort. And when you look at the hyperscale, as you look at the different clouds, when you're looking at security and just being able to trust that your data is safe, that, you know, how would you say, you don't necessarily have rogue employees using credentials that they shouldn't be getting into, things of that sort, you kind of naturally land at Oracle because we take a very different look at security than what some of the other hyperscalers do.
" Like, that's the most common one with just the wrong credentials applied to publicly accessible data. >> You know, so we'll kind of go off script here a little bit, you know, not that there's a script, but for me, I get frustrated when I see data breaches and things like that through all the cloud vendors, you know, coming from that security background because we have all the tools we need to secure those environments. But people get lazy or budgets get tight, and we kind of lose sight, right?
>> Right. >> We don't want to spend all that money, even though, you know, a million dollars here or $2 million there could save a $10 billion data breach over there, right? So a lot of times it's we're not doing everything as teams, internal teams, as we should. Knowing that, I specifically represent the VMware solution Oracle Cloud. And unlike all the other hyperscalers where those are hyperscaler-managed solutions, we are not. We are customer managed. When we provision your environment, when we provision that VMware software-defined data center inside of OCI, once it's provisioned, we give the root and administrative credentials to you.
We don't maintain them. Our people don't maintain them. We can't get access to it. And that has its pros and cons. Pros being, you know, a third-party vendor doesn't have access to the data, does not have access to security credentials, things of that sort. The negative is if you break it, I can't just jump in there and fix it for you, right? You have to go back and give me credentials back to be able to get in there and fix it.
So not having, as a third-party vendor, as a hyperscaler, access to that data plane or that data layer. Now we have the financial sector, now we have health and oil and gas and even retail with their IP now trusting us as a hyperscaler 'cause we don't have access to their data. They don't have to worry about us leaving, you know, a data store open or backups. If you want to run your own encryption keys or anything like that, we don't maintain that access.
We give that to you as a customer to maintain. And now your penetration testing, internal and external, can do what they want, how they want, and verify that everything is locked down 'cause they don't have to worry about the hyperscaler. >> So I've heard this message from Oracle before, which is basically consistency of operating model. What's the target customer for Oracle Cloud? Like, what's the sweet spot? >> You know, I think our sweet spot are, you know, just for lack of a better term, you know, control freaks, right?
They want the ability of cloud, they want the scalability of cloud, they want cloud economics, but yet they want to control it, right? They want to maintain and make sure that things are run the way they want to. And not only that, they don't want to worry about changing tool sets that they've been using and have runbooks for it. You know, because when we talk about refactoring or, you know, removing or replacing, excuse me, the things that go along with that that people don't recognize is all the ancillary things that have to happen when you do that, right?
With us, you're not having to change all the ancillary things. You can bring your current processes, your current tools, things of that sort, bring them right into OCI and OCVS, and that day-two operations just keeps right on chugging the way it was. >> So let's talk about pros and cons of that model. Let's start out with pros. The pro is that if I have runbooks, and I have compliance challenges, et cetera, I'm not reconfiguring any of that. I had a conversation with Kelsey Hightower from Google Cloud yesterday, and one of the things that he talked about was that we forget, as folks with 25 plus years experience, as architects, there was a first time.
>> (laughs) Right. >> Like, there was a first time we had to go and stand up a new environment. We didn't know how to do it. If you inherited a landscape that's been there for 10, 12, 15 years and you need to all of a sudden move that to the public cloud, Oracle can hold your hand doing that moving to the public cloud. That's a pro, correct? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, we have our cloudless services team that is just built by exceptional people across the globe, right?
So it doesn't matter if it's your VMware environment that you're moving into OCVS. Doesn't matter if you're taking your databases from on-prem and moving them into autonomous database or database as a service or anything like that. We have our Cloud Lift Services team that is just, it's some of the smartest people I've ever worked with. And I'm proud to say I've worked with some very smart people, right? So we're there to hold your hand, lead the way, train the trainer, if that's what you want us to do.
And a lot of our customers do, right? They want to take that first third, hey, we'll show you how to do it. That second third, we'll let you do it, but we'll look over your shoulder. And maybe that last third we're just an escalation point or something like that because we want you to be able to make those migration changes when they make sense for you, not necessarily at two o'clock AM, or if you have developers in India or something like that, or overseas, or if you've got workloads coming here.
We want you to be able to do it. So we kind of do that train the trainer philosophy. We'll move as much as you want us to, but we'd rather teach you how to fish than just give you a fish, right? >> And I think the other opportunity is now that you've lifted your existing operations into, essentially, let's call it phase one, the new data center, like, I've outsourced my data center, the big difference, in my opinion, is the improve part. Now that I have my infrastructure in a cloud environment, I can add to it by using cloud services.
So give me some concrete examples of day two. As customers have moved their landscape into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, what's some of the first things that they do? >> Well, let's talk about before they actually make the move, right? I think a lot of our customers are going looking at security, and we force that subject. So the way that we build out our security model, you need to have that in place before you deploy anything. We don't want you to have rogue IT.
We don't want, you know, DevOps teams being able to go over here and spin things up as they want and forgetting about them, forgetting to turn them off. Then all of a sudden you get this bill at the end of the month and go, you know, "Oh my goodness", right? So for our day one, it's all about setting up that security, that security posture. You know, our services that we have on Microsoft Azure. You know, a lot of people don't know, we're the only two clouds that really work together.
You know, we have an interconnect between us and Azure that allows you to use Azure services against Oracle services, Oracle services against Azure. You know, a week or two ago, we had the big announcement about Oracle databases being available in Microsoft Azure. You know, I have personally have tons of customers that are using the Microsoft AD and DNS and BI all in Azure, but yet against workloads inside of OCI, and vice versa, right? So that's really that day-one security structure that we're going to set up.
Day two, we're going to sit there and we're going to help you. You know, we talked about cloudless services. We want to truly understand everything you've got going on 'cause I can tell you now, a lot of times I had problems as a customer, that unless you sat down with me for a solid week even, you're never going to understand. You can't just walk into my office and understand the challenges and the problems that I had, right? So we really want to learn what you're doing and where we can better help that.
If that's migrating your databases from on-prem into, let's say, OCVS, inside of Oracle, or if it's moving those databases or web logic or, you know, any of these edge services into OCI, the cloud, we want to have a true understanding of what you're doing before we make that first click, right? That's important to us. >> So let's shift to the cons. In my opinion, and for those who don't know, me and Ray have a history. We've gone back and forth for years about the solutions that he's evangelized or supported, and me pushing back on whether this is a net benefit or not.
So the con, in my opinion, is that there's not a forcing factor. 7. >> Ray: Absolutely. >> And I'm not modernizing my application. So did I just lift and shift with no value, true value of the cloud, or? >> Well, let's break that down, right? Yes, you are true lift and shift because we do have version autonomy, right? We will support whatever VMware supports. 0 inside of us too, right? But to me, that's not a con, right?
Because a lot of times, as a infrastructure architect or director, my systems may not be tested against the new versions. So if I want to move into the cloud and another hyperscaler is going to force me to go to a version that I'm not ready for, is that really a con, or is that scenario the con, right? So we're going to allow you to go to what version you want to, but then, you know, in our spring release, we just released in-place upgrades.
2, whatever you want to go to. So it's a con that you get to go to your version. You're not doing it at the time you're making that migration, but you have every tool at your disposal to be able to click a button and get to where you need to be. >> So last con, and then, because I'm going to leave that as a teaser. We have a second conversation with a OCVS product manager. We're going to go on some good detail on that.
>> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> But I'm going to leave with one last question around Oracle promotes this ideal of their network approach to services. One of the challenges with Oracle is just the size of the Oracle Cloud versus the other cloud providers. But you guys tout this kind of concept that, once you deploy a zone, whether it's on premises or in a public available, that all services are available. I'm challenging that. How is that possible? >> So I was just doing a customer sizing yesterday morning.
Customer asked us to, you know, put us against another hyperscaler. And when I was trying to go into the publicly referenceable websites trying to do that sizing, I struggled because what I was trying to compare against was not available in any of the other regions. It was only available in one region, right? So inside of OCI and OCVS, everything's a first-class citizen. We don't deploy a service, we don't deploy a capability unless it's available in all 39 regions. That's just the way we approach it, right?
Now, you may be able to get in a whitelist and get early access to it, but something doesn't go GA until it's in all 39 regions. And against popular belief, hearing a couple articles that have come out here recently, we are the biggest cloud out there. You know, there was a comment that was made out there on another, you know, Twitter account, we'll say, that said another hyperscaler has more regions than we do, but they don't have availability in all those regions. Well, if you don't have availability in those regions, I'm not counting them as a region, right?
(laughs) So we are the biggest out there. We have 39 regions. We tend to deploy a new region at least once a month. I'm glad to hear products coming on with you because we've got some exciting new releases coming up. I get excited, and our customers are excited about it too, right? They finally get to get public cloud the way they want it, right? Not the way somebody's forcing them to go to. And that's exciting for us. That's exciting for our customers.
And because of that, I'm excited. >> Well, Ray, I appreciate you joining the show. You're welcome on anytime. Remember, the CTO Advisor Studio is where we come to have the conversations you're mostly interested in. You want to know why Oracle Cloud is the best solution for your environment, or maybe another cloud provider? Oracle commissioned a report with the CTO Advisor comparing the major cloud environments. It's a little old, but it's still extremely relevant, in my opinion. We'll provide a link below to that report.
You want to learn more about the CTO Advisor, you can follow us on the web. com. I think I'll ask Ray some tough questions, but if you disagree, my DMs are open, and you can ask me a question that I can relay to Ray. We'll get the answer to you on Twitter, @ctoadvisor on Twitter. Stay tuned for more coverage for VMware Explore 2022. >> Participant: You had to work with who? What?
