Oracle is boosting its cloud service offerings on all fronts: physical footprint, service-level agreements and expanded automation features across its cloud platform.
In a series of announcements today, the company outlined a significant expansion of its data center regions and the level of automation in its cloud services that will be implemented in the first half of this year, with an emphasis on artificial intelligence and machine-learning-based features across its cloud platform.
Oracle is broadening its regional data center footprint with a dozen new data center regions that are aimed at increasing its available Oracle Cloud services in Asia, the Americas and Europe. Oracle said that it is expanding data center locations in the Asia-Pacific region including in China, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and South Korea. In Europe, it will expand locations in Amsterdam and Switzerland. Its North American additions will include two locations in Canada and two new locations in the United States, which Oracle said would support workloads from the U.S. Department of Defense.
The company also expanded its service level agreement with new guarantees related to performance, manageability, and availability, which it called “the three key characteristics defining how enterprises measure cloud infrastructure providers.” Oracle said that it will guarantee that its Oracle Cloud infrastructure “will deliver more than 90 percent of published performance every day in a given month. If it falls below that level for even as few as 44 minutes a month, customers may claim service credits according to Oracle’s terms of service.”
Oracle said that its new SLA guarantees are the industry’s “first end-to-end financially backed cloud warranty for Infrastructure-as-a-Service.”
Meanwhile, Oracle outlined new autonomous capabilities that it will be implementing in its cloud service offerings, features that have been available via its Oracle Autonomous Database solution and that it says will make all of its cloud platform services “self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing.” Oracle plans to introduce autonomous database services for specific workloads, but also to make more automation available in its broader cloud service platform starting in the first half of this year. Operational functions such as patching, upgrades and back-ups will be automated, Oracle said, in addition to more capabilities in automation in areas that include application development, analytics, self-learning chatbots, security, management, and app and data integration.
