Oracle Database@AWS goes GA: Exadata and Autonomous DB now live in the US

Oracle and AWS have expanded their collaboration to make the Oracle Database@AWS service generally available in the US.

The Oracle Database@AWS service, previewed in September last year, is a continuation of Oracle’s strategy to partner with hyperscalers to offer its database services in the latter’s infrastructure.

In September 2023, Oracle started collocating its Oracle database hardware (including Oracle Exadata) and software in Microsoft Azure data centers, giving customers direct access to Oracle database services running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) via Azure.

Last year in June, Oracle signed a similar deal with Google to make its database services more widely available.

Oracle Database@AWS entered limited preview in December, and customers who signed up for early access were able to run and try out Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI in AWS, starting with the US East region in Northern Virginia.

“We are now GA across two regions — AWS US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) regions with Oracle Exadata Database Service and Oracle Autonomous Database on dedicated infrastructure on OCI within AWS,” an Oracle spokesperson said.

The cloud region strategy

Explaining Oracle and AWS’ strategy to offer the limited preview in Northern Virginia first and later expand to Oregon with general availability, Shelly Kramer, founder and principal analyst at Kramer & Company, said that both regions serve the vast majority of AWS’ US customer base.

“North Virginia is AWS’s largest, oldest, most mature, and most widely used AWS region. Likewise, Oregon is considered the flagship for AWS’ western presence,” Kramer added.

Furthermore, Kramer noted that the choice of the two regions is a well-thought-out strategy.

“Oracle Database@AWS requires integration with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) regions, and both North Virginia and Oregon are paired with OCI regions in Phoenix, Arizona, and Ashburn, Virginia. This enables seamless service provisioning and connectivity between AWS and OCI, which is crucial for customers,” Kramer said.

Starting in two key regions also enables the fine-tuning of performance optimization and the integration of customer feedback before rolling out to other areas, Kramer added. 

The availability of the service across two regions in the US will allow more customers to adopt the service as more regions mean more capacity, said Tobi Bet, senior director analyst at Gartner.Separately, Forrester VP and principal analyst Noel Yuhanna pointed out that the service being available in two regions provides the critical resiliency needed for enterprises to run mission-critical workloads reliably in the cloud.

The focus, according to Yuhanna, is on ensuring high availability, and since the regions are geographically isolated, an outage in one doesn’t necessarily impact the other.

Availability in 20 additional regions

In addition to the US regions, Oracle and AWS plan to expand the availability of Oracle Database@AWS to 20 regions over the next 12-18 months, said Kambiz Aghili, VP of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

These regions include Canada (Central), Frankfurt, Hyderabad, Ireland, London, Melbourne, Milan, Mumbai, Osaka, Paris, São Paulo, Seoul, Singapore, Spain, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo, US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), and Zurich.

These additional regions will make it easier for enterprises to comply with data sovereignty requirements while still taking advantage of the cloud, said David Menninger, director at ISG Software Research.

“Also, if an enterprise is seeking to adopt a multicloud strategy, the more regions available, the more options available to it to split or share workloads,” Menninger added.

Explaining further, Menninger said that additional regions are likely to benefit two types of enterprises — large multinationals that operate in multiple regions and relatively smaller, local enterprises that want to utilize local cloud services.

These additional regions, according to Bradley Shimmin, lead of the data and analytics practice at The Futurum Group, will help in the uptake of the service.

Enterprise decision makers these days favor optionality, particularly in managing data assets and any service offering a single provisioning, management, governance, and observability pane for that data across diverse deployment strata, just like Oracle Database@Azure, will ultimately win over siloed or complex multi-hybrid cloud capabilities, Shimmin explained.

The analyst was referring to Oracle Database@AWS’ capabilities such as simplified management, unified billing, and zero-ETL.