3 min

Oracle’s cloud is growing fast, based on what Oracle tells us. The company talks about triple digit growth across their cloud offerings. To keep up with this growth, it also needs new cloud regions, on top of the thirty it already offers worldwide. Today Oracle announced that no fewer than twelve will be added before the end of 2022.

We have previously written about the history of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Oracle has invested very heavily in OCI, particularly over the past few years. It built a very diverse set of cloud offerings for customers. The Cloud@Customer offerings are a good example. As a customer of Oracle, you can purchase a complete cloud region, managed by Oracle. You set this up within the walls of your own buildings. Oracle calls this a Dedicated Region. If a full cloud region is not necessary, but you would like to run Exadata on OCI within your own walls, then that is also possible. If you’re in an industry where you primarily need a ruggedized cloud offering, then Roving Edge is an option. It’s about options at Oracle. This is partly because they have to be different from their competitors, but also because it’s what customers would like to see.

Cloud at new locations

A major reason for choosing a Cloud@Customer implementation for many customers has to do with local laws and regulations. Oracle does not have a physical presence in all countries. If data is not allowed to leave the country, but you want to use, for example, the Autonomous Database or the Exadata offering, Cloud@Customer is an interesting solution.

However, not all customers who prefer or are required to have their data in their own country/region want to have a cloud region on their premises. Those customers couldn use OCI until now, if Oracle didn’t have a physical presence in their country. This will now change, at least for some countries. Oracle adds fourteen new cloud regions. In Europe, they will be in Milan, Stockholm, Marseille and a location in Spain that we cannot specify any further at this time. Outside Europe, Oracle adds cloud regions in Singapore, Johannesburg, Jerusalem, Mexico and Colombia. In the latter two countries, it is not yet clear in which city. In Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, France, Israel and Chile there will be additional cloud regions. Oracle already has a cloud region there.

Availability, resilience and dual-region

More cloud regions naturally means higher availability of data and services for customers. You can now choose from more locations and also spread them out more. In addition to availability, the cloud regions must also be secure, of course. The autonomous nature of OCI should partly ensure this, but Oracle also ensures that steps are taken physically within the cloud regions. For example, each region consists of three so-called fault domains. Each domain is a collection of hardware that together forms a logical data center. So you have three per cloud region, which together should provide redundancy and thus higher availability and protection against hardware and network problems.

Oracle also regularly mentions the term dual-region in relation to their cloud strategy. In short, this means that there is more than one cloud region in a single country. In this way, in addition to protection within a single region, you can build in geographically better protection. You can divide your processes, data and workloads across two geographically distinct locations. You can theoretically do this with cloud regions in other countries, but not all organizations are allowed to do this. With dual-region, even organizations that need to keep their data in a specific country can take advantage of this important additional way to protect that data. FastConnect provides a fast connection between the different cloud regions in a country, as it already does between most of the other cloud regions.

The goal for Oracle is to eventually offer at least two cloud regions in virtually every country in which it operates. Currently, this is already the case in the US, Canada, the UK, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, India and Australia. When the planned expansions are in place, it will add Chile, France, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Finally, of course, there is also the collaboration with Microsoft. There is an interconnect between OCI and Azure in eight cloud regions. This makes it possible for customers to run workloads spread across the two clouds. An application in Azure that uses a database in OCI, for example.