By Leo Leung, Vice President, Product Management, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

In the new era of cloud computing, customers want to use their preferred cloud services regardless of provider and be assured those services will work together. In addition, they want to continue to rely on familiar management and monitoring consoles so they don’t have to learn new skills to maintain productivity.

This multicloud mandate is why Oracle and Microsoft have worked together to forge cloud service interoperability across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Microsoft Azure with the new Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure. Available now, this service allows the many customers served by both companies to use popular Microsoft Azure-based services that tap into OCI database services in a secure and expeditious way. 

Oracle and Microsoft agree that making it easier for customers to keep running their cloud services of choice—regardless of provenance—is important since we want those customers to be happy (and to remain customers).

Yes, you can run workloads across clouds

The new Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure lets Azure customers manage database operations from their familiar Azure interface while taking full advantage of the speed and power of Oracle databases. Customers don’t have to know or care that the databases themselves are running on OCI since they will not experience any latency, thanks to the careful infrastructure groundwork the two companies have already put in place (more on that below.) Practically, this means that businesses can bring Microsoft Power BI business analytics, Microsoft Azure Synapse big data analytics, or other applications to bear on data running in Oracle Autonomous Database or Oracle Exadata Database Service.

This new service counters the notion, peddled for years by some vendors, that customers can’t successfully run workloads across clouds. On the contrary, this service gives customers the freedom to keep using the services they prefer on data running in another cloud. 

Also important: this new service automates the network and security configuration processes that customers up until now had to do perform manually. And they can easily provision Oracle databases, and the metrics and logs are automatically sent to their Azure App Insights and Log Analytics dashboards – just like the rest of their Azure resources.

Laying the groundwork for cloud interoperability 

What makes Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure possible is the path Oracle and Microsoft started paving three years ago with Oracle Interconnect for Azure, which provides a secure, private link between the two clouds in regions around the world. The interconnect supports data transmission, queries, API calls, and other interactions between the two clouds with under two milliseconds of latency, allowing joint customers to securely run Microsoft services against data stored in Oracle databases without any loss in efficiency. 

Multicloud projects like these will become the way forward as business customers seek to move more of their key IT to the cloud without losing the valuable features and functions that are running their operations on-premises.  

It’s easy to see why tech providers want the biggest possible chunk of a customer’s IT budget. That’s why many have built walled gardens of technologies for every possible requirement to keep customers from wandering. 

But customers don’t really care about vendor go-to-market strategies—they just want to run the best services for their workloads, and they want those distributed services to work together. That’s why Oracle and Microsoft will continue to facilitate cross-cloud collaboration going forward.  

The goal is to ensure that customer workloads work well on-premises, in the cloud, and across different clouds. The Oracle Interconnect for Azure and new database service proves that operating workloads across clouds is not only possible, but in fact very productive.