Azure & OpenAI’s Preferred Cloud

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has positioned itself as a leader among alternative cloud providers, boasting 49% growth in Q3 2024. This growth is likely fuelled by OCI’s strong integration capabilities with enterprise applications, making it an attractive option for businesses seeking robust cloud solutions beyond the dominant hyper-scalers. Yet, OCI faces some challenges, including a steep learning curve, complex setup, and occasional performance slowdowns.

Explore what is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, its features, pros and cons based on user reviews, and its alternatives.

Review of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

The pros and cons rely on the most repeated user comments in the last two years on B2B user review platforms, such as G2, TrustRadius, and PeerSpot

Pros

• Cost-effective solution: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure users mention cost-effective pricing. Users specifically like pay-as-you-use model with a no-cost layer for POC solutions. This cost advantage also lead even other hyperscalers like Azure to deploy on OCI. 
• Bare metal GPUs: Among hyperscalers, OCI is the only one that offers bare metal instances for leading GPUs such as A100, V100, H100 and AMD’s MI300X. For more: Cloud GPUs
• User-friendly platform: Most of the comments mention that OCI delivers a user-friendly interface, making navigation and management much easier. The platform ensures that users can quickly access and manage resources. Some users found cloud storage, business intelligence and email communication system intuitive and straightforward. 
• Scalability: Users positively speak of scalability and ease of data transfer from on-premises to the cloud.
• Integration: As user comments show, Oracle Cloud supports numerous integration services, enabling seamless connections between various systems. For some users, OCI’s integration with on-premises VPNs allows secure connections between cloud and local environments.
• Virtual machine: Oracle Cloud offers virtual machines that had been mentioned provides a reliable virtualization environment for users to run multiple operating systems seamlessly for flexible workload management. These machines are easy to set-up and capable of handling intensive workloads with high CPU capacity. 

Cons

• Learning curve: A major critique against OCI is the steep learning curve for new users.
• CI/CD deployment: Some users mention that CI/CD automation and deployment of applications need improvement. 
• Complex setup: Most users mention that OCI requires significant IT expertise for setup and monitoring mentions, specifically for virtual machines and load balancing capabilities.
• Performance goes down: Some users experienced performance slowdowns but these instances were infrequent and typically short-lived.
• Service availability: Some users complain that Oracle Cloud’s service availability may sometimes fluctuate, impacting reliability during periods of maintenance or outages.

What is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), a service by Oracle Corporation, offers a comprehensive suite of cloud computing solutions including servers, storage, networks, applications, and services, all delivered through a globally managed network of Oracle-operated independent data center. It was first launched as Oracle Bare Metal Cloud Services in 2016, was rebranded in 2018 as part of Oracle’s “Generation 2 Cloud.”

Oracle cloud infrastructure platform enables users to build, deploy, integrate, and extend cloud-based applications by offering: 

• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
• Platform as a service (PaaS)
• Software as a service (SaaS)
• Data as a service (DaaS).

Oracle’s cloud platform supports a wide range of open standards (such as SQL, HTML5, REST), open-source technologies (including Kubernetes, Spark, Hadoop, Kafka, MySQL, Terraform), and various programming languages, databases, tools, and frameworks, offering compatibility with Oracle-specific, open-source, and third-party systems.

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OCI services and capabilities

OCI offers a range of Oracle cloud services, including:

• Compute: Offers Virtual Machine Instances and Bare Metal servers, with options for Intel, AMD, and ARM processors. Oracle’s bare metal instances cater to different workload needs, including GPU-powered options.
• Storage: Offers multiple storage solutions, including object storage, block volumes, and file storage, optimized for databases and applications.
• Networking: Features customizable networks with routing, subnets, and firewalls, ensuring security across a globalnetwork of connected systems.
• Database management: Supports Oracle databases, including the oracle autonomous database, optimized for datawarehousing and transaction processing..
• Load balancing: Distributes traffic across cloud regions to ensure high availability and fault tolerance.
• Edge services: Monitors connections between users and resources, adapting to outages and changes.
• FastConnect: Provides secure, private connectivity between cloud and on-premises systems via partnerships with providers like Equinix and AT&T.
• Application development: Supports container-native and low-code development, with a DevOps platform for CI/CD, and integration with Java applications and other Oracle services. This enables cloud native development and supports containerized applications for efficient deployment.
• Integration: Offers a suite of platform services to integrate on-premise and cloud applications, including data migration and API management.
• Business analytics: Offers tools for analyzing data from various sources, including applications and data lakes, with services like data visualization and business intelligence.
• Security: Features identity and access management for securing cloud environments and ensuring compliance.
• Management: Delivers integrated monitoring and management tools, utilizing machine learning to enhance IT stability, security, and performance.

Partnerships

Azure: Microsoft and Oracle’s partnership aims to deliver an interconnected multi-cloud experience between Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). With this partnership, Azure-based applications can connect to Oracle’s high-performance databases, including Autonomous Database, Exadata, and MySQL HeatWave, for improved efficiency. The collaboration can also enable unified data management, allowing applications like Oracle E-Business Suite to run on OCI while managing distributed data across OCI and Azure.

OpenAI: Oracle and OpenAI have partnered to extend OpenAI’s capacity by leveraging Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). OpenAI, known for ChatGPT, will use OCI’s advanced AI infrastructure to scale its operations. OCI offers 64k NVIDIA GPUs connected by ultra-low-latency networking, which is a fast and cost-effective platform for training large language models (LLMs). This way, OpenAI can run AI workloads efficiently while building and training models faster.

Real-life Oracle Cloud Infrastructure applications 

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) enables financial institutions to manage risk, improve customer experiences, and combat financial crime by integrating data lakehouse technology, machine learning, and analytics to enhance insights, streamline processes, and improve decision-making.

Case study 1

Unimed, the largest healthcare system in Brazil, faced the challenge of rapidly expanding its electronic medical record (EMR) system to comply with a national COVID-19 reporting protocol. To meet this need, Unimed chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to quickly scale its EMR system across 344 branches.

Results

• EMR deployment to all branches in under 15 days
• Increased visibility into COVID-19 cases and hospital capacity
• Over 32,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases reported by October 2020
• Faster, more efficient data reporting across the network
• Support for critical healthcare operations during the pandemic.

Case study 2

Deutsche Bank faced the challenge of managing over 10,000 databases while reducing energy consumption, controlling costs, and complying with European data protection rules. To modernize its systems, the bank migrated to Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, improving database efficiency and sustainability while keeping control over sensitive data. Deutsche Bank can streamline operations and expand its internal tech talent with OCI.

Expected results

• Save millions of euros
• Cut energy use by over 50%
• Automated database upgrades and tasks
• Enhanced security.

Case study 3

Kansas faced the challenge of scaling its legacy IT systems to support increased demand for social services during the COVID-19 pandemic. The state migrated its Kansas Eligibility Enforcement System (KEES) to Oracle Cloud, ensuring flexibility and scalability to meet federal mandates and serve citizens efficiently.

Results

• $11 million in SNAP benefits distributed to 60,000 citizens in one night
• Faster issuance of childcare and energy assistance
• Migration completed in 3 days with minimal disruption
• Immediate performance improvements and cost savings
• Ability to handle increased applications and program changes during the pandemic.

Case study 4

TIM Brasil faced the challenge of improving customer service and operational efficiency to become Brazil’s leading telecommunications operator by 2023. To achieve this, the company migrated its on-premises infrastructure to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), enhancing its ability to quickly scale and innovate.

Results

• 50% average reduction in handling customer service inquiries
• Up to 65% reduction for specific segments
• Improved operational efficiency and customer experience
• More secure environment for customer data protection
• Enhanced business resilience and innovative product development.