Oracle today unfurled at an Oracle CloudWorld event what it describes as a completely autonomous cloud service the company will manage primarily on behalf of application developers.
The Oracle Autonomous Cloud Platform is a managed service that makes extensive use of machine and deep learning algorithms across instances of Oracle software that can invoked on a public cloud or deployed in an on-premises IT environment, said Amit Zavery, executive vice president of product development for Oracle Cloud Platform.
“We’re taking away all the day-to-day management issues,” Zavery said.
The Oracle Autonomous Cloud Platform builds on the Autonomous Database service launched last year. This latest service essentially puts all the responsibility for managing IT operations on Oracle, which is relying on a major investment in machine learning algorithms to automate DevOps processes.
The implications of that capability are profound for IT organizations, many of which Zavery said now will be able to shift more resources over to developing and maintaining applications. At a time when more organizations are focusing on digital business transformation, those organizations need to be able to free up resources to focus in application development, he said.
Examples of how Oracle envisions the transformation of both DevOps and DevSecOps include chatbots that can be interacted with using natural language processing to automate repetitive tasks to automatically identifying and remediating security issues in code within the context of a continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) deployment. There are also controls to prevent data leaks across structured and unstructured data repositories, along with built-in security monitoring tools.
Other capabilities include an ability to create data flows with automated data lake and data prep pipeline creation for ingesting both stream and batch-oriented data, as well as automating the integration of various on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
Advanced analytics tools span everything from automated data discovery and preparation to visualization tools for displaying trends.
Oracle may have come late to the cloud computing game, but clearly it intends to make up lost ground by infusing higher levels of automation into cloud services that rivals don’t yet provide. Most cloud service providers are headed in the same general direction as Oracle. But the scope of automation being provided by Oracle, spanning both a public cloud and on-premises IT environments, is unprecedented.
In many ways that level of automation may represent an existential threat to a larger number of IT operations professionals. At the same time, it presents an opportunity. IT professionals should be able to spend more time adding true value to the business instead of having all their time and energy consumed by merely keeping the proverbial lights on in the data center.
Of course, it may take a while for most organizations to make a transition to a single stack of integrated hardware and software provided by a single vendor. Most organizations have decades worth of IT infrastructure consisting of databases, middleware, virtual machines, servers and storage systems all from different vendors. Even if organizations decided the time had come to rationalize those investments in favor of a suite of managed cloud services, it would take several years to make that transition.
In addition, many organizations would also still need to evaluate the total cost of acquiring and managing IT infrastructure over several years versus contracting for services over the same period of time.
Regardless of the path a company chooses, IT operations is about to be transformer utterly by artificial intelligence (AI)-infused automaton.
