Before I begin, I will state that I had a very hard time writing this blog post.  It wasn’t that the presentation and associated information provided were that tough to disseminate through, it’s just that I felt, for a long time, that I had way too much bias to write this post.  See, I’ve bought into the cloud models that have been presented by market leaders like Amazon and Microsoft.  Concepts like “lift and shift”, along with legacy enablement are considered passé to me.  Refactor or stay with in your own data center or with your managed service provider on your aging infrastructure stacks that have your applications bound too tightly.

However, as time went on, I felt it was time to finally get out what my thoughts were on the combined presentations between Oracle Ravello Blogger Day (#RBD2) and that from Cloud Field Day 3 (#CFD3).  I was able to be in attendance for the Oracle Ravello Blogger Day and I relied upon recordings from Cloud Field Day 3 to get these thoughts finally penned.

So, my thoughts?  Let’s set the moment first.  As this was the second rendition of Oracle Ravello Blogger Day, I had to turn down an invite to the first one.  This means that my reference point isn’t coming from someone who got to see what this relationship looked like a calendar year ago.  While we were presented a roadmap of how thing have been going and what’s changed since the last event, I personally was not able to correlate what the entire environment looked like a year prior.  Will that skewer some of my points?  It very well might.  However, I do think some themes are still going to be valid without that data point.

WHY ask WHY

Nearly my entire thought process for the calendar year, thus far, of 2018 can be summed up by the name of a single author, Simon Sinek.  Mr. Sinek wrote a series of books and gave a series of presentations about the concept of WHY.  The concept of WHY is a simple one; it’s about inspiration.  Even the back of Mr. Sinek’s book, Start with Why, states that, “Any person or organization can explain what they do; some can explain how they are different or better; but very few can clearly articulate why.”

No pun intended, but why is this important?  I believe the concept of WHY is important here because I feel that OCI is missing a very clear message of WHY.  I do believe that both Amazon and Microsoft have started to establish clearer WHY messages when it comes to their clouds.  Most of the information that I got from Oracle Ravello Blogger Day (and that of Cloud Field Day) seemed to focus on the WHAT and the HOW (through multiple discussions about the infrastructure, pricing models, SLAs, services).  Multiple industries are riddled with stories of copycats that tried to match their industry leading brethren, only to fail miserably in their endeavor to keep up.  Using an example from Mr. Sinek’s book, if you focus on the airline industry, Southwest Airlines is considered the king, in terms of profitability and loyalty.  Many other airlines tried to execute in the same budget-conscious space, including nearly clear knock offs of Southwest Airlines’ tactics.  However, you’ll find that none of those attempts lasted.  It’s a cautionary tale to other industries that you might be able to copy a competitor, even to the point of clear plagiarism, but unless you can capture a good WHY, you’ll be doomed before you even begin.

Cohesion

Cloud cohesion is a big thing for me.  What I mean by cloud cohesion is that all the parts of the cloud, whether it’s the infrastructure components, the platform components, and all the “glue” that holds it together in between, are created with a purpose to better the system, rather than to be some sort of standalone part that just exists outside of whatever core that is being built.

Now, it’s no secret that Oracle is behind in the cloud game.  To capture a market segment, they’ve had to build their cloud via acquisition.  In most industries, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing and honestly, for the sake of trying to catch up to Amazon and Microsoft, it was an absolute necessity.  Unfortunately, what happens with acquisitions is the awkward period where integrations feel (and certainly look) clunky to the outside eye.  No greater example of this when a demo to show how to take a peered network in OCI and leverage that network in Ravello.  Work had to be done in the appearance of two discreet systems, with no real way of confirming that the peered network was presented properly.  If I go back to my idea of cohesion, this would not qualify as cohesive.

To bridge on the cohesion message, Oracle wanted to talk about things like containers and serverless (FaaS).  Personally, from what I’ve seen, we might be getting a bit ahead of ourselves.  I consider Amazon Web Services Lambda and Azure Functions to be the ultimate expressions of cohesion across their cloud platforms.  All that these platforms can call upon is available and easily condensed to short batches of code.  Due to the nature of what I saw with network peering, I think any talk about function-based services in OCI is extremely premature, especially with the evolving ecosystem.  There was even discussion in the conference room about trying to compare this platform to that of VMware-on-AWS and even I thought was putting the cart well before the horse, as well.

If there’s a hill I’m going to die on, in terms of my feelings about OCI’s roadmap, it’s that there’s a lot of work to go before we can start tying things together with a FaaS offering.  I need to see more cohesion before I even think this needs to be attempted.  Attempting to roll something out like this is going to immediately go back to the WHY message in the prior section.  Imitation without a WHY is a recipe to a failed product.

Infrastructure, Infrastructure, Infrastructure

I’ll give Oracle this, they really want you to get out of your on-premises locations and use their infrastructure components.  That message still suffers based on the assumption that all workloads for a prospective customer are x86-based or have some sort of compliance (or even latency) requirements that prohibit the moving of those workloads to their cloud.  As much as we’ve been told that “cloud is the future”, I can point to out hundreds of examples of companies, large and small, that have 30-year old mainframe systems powering the core business.  Perhaps a facelift to front-end applications has occurred, but somewhere, there’s still a translated call in that new front-end application that is converted into something the legacy system can process.

There’s a level of attractiveness to what Oracle is trying to sell in their infrastructure SLAs.  Having been in the managed service provider business for an extended period, SLAs represent risk reduction and moving workloads to another provider is, at its core, a risky proposition.  Many an enterprise will certainly enjoy having reduced risk in terms of lifting and shifting (or, forgive me, moving and improving).

This is where the part of me that believes in refactoring applications (under the right circumstances) for cloud native approaches.  Decoupling the application layer from limitations on the infrastructure layer is exactly you want to be doing.  Therefore, I’m not one to really get all that enamored by the idea of infrastructure SLAs.  As an organization, I’m instructing, as the business, to my development arm, to reduce this burden upon the business.

However, I’m reminded, even in my own words a few paragraphs back, that not every organization is ready, nor willing to take on the burden and risk of a major application refactoring task.  Keep that legacy application packaged up in the same form factor (typically a virtual machine) and don’t bother with really improving it.  The primary use case here is that, barring getting past the compliance and latency gate, is to reduce costs.  Oracle will sell you a much-reduced cost for operating legacy application stacks.  Based on the way enterprises operate, this may very well be the pinnacle of Oracle’s cloud.

Conclusion

I do realize that I do have some cloud biases.  I even stated as such at the beginning and bordered on showing it again talking about cloud native applications.  I really want to believe in what Oracle is doing.  There might be a damn good path in there for them.  Maybe even a path that Amazon and Microsoft aren’t either willing to go down.  We don’t have those answers right now.  Oracle should continue to stay the course with what they are working on, but they really need to work on their WHY messaging.

I do wish Oracle the best here.  They are in a race where they are woefully behind and may never really catch up to the development arms of Amazon and Microsoft.  There’s a very comfortable message here that can make Oracle relevant for a very long time in this space.  However, given the history of Oracle, I’m not sure “relevant” is the pinnacle they are looking for.

That being said, maybe I check in on the progress next calendar year with an invite to Ravello Blogger Day 3 (my not so subtle hint)?  😊