Oracle: Gen 2 Cloud Infrastructure

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How did this fit within the broader strategic priorities during your time there? What were the broader strategic priorities, and how did they evolve during your time at Oracle?

On the AI side, inferencing with the ARM model was advantageous because it was cheaper and more energy-efficient compared to other cloud providers. Pricing was a key factor, especially for late market entrants. OCI offered aggressive pricing to gain market share and establish a foothold. This strategy worked well for them. While other players are also significant, Oracle has a steady business with sufficient cash flow to subsidize the business until they gain significant momentum and become a real competitor. This has been the case over the past five to six years.

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Turning to the technical aspects of OCI, I want a better understanding of how it differs from and is similar to AWS. A good starting point would be to understand Oracle's cloud journey, the development of Oracle Gen 2, and how it compares to the first generation of their cloud offering.

Gen 2 is the name Oracle came up with to differentiate themselves from other cloud providers since OCI was a late entrant. The journey began when Larry Ellison decided Oracle should move into the cloud business. They acquired a startup, which was essentially version one of the cloud, similar to what other providers were doing. For context, AWS launched in 2005 or 2006, so it's been almost 20 years. Oracle's initial move into the cloud was around 2014 when they acquired a startup to launch the 0.5 or 1.0 workloads. This involved running VMs in large data centers to run databases. However, they soon realized this approach wouldn't scale or differentiate them from competitors, who had a decade's head start with more services, regions, and availability zones worldwide. Oracle needed something different.

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Turning to the technical aspects of OCI, I want a better understanding of how it differs from and is similar to AWS. A good starting point would be to understand Oracle's cloud journey, the development of Oracle Gen 2, and how it compares to the first generation of their cloud offering.

Oracle decided to design the new Oracle Cloud, called Gen 2, to be different from other cloud platforms by re-architecting everything from the ground up. Other providers, having been around longer, were tied to older architecture and hardware from 20 years ago. Upgrading millions of machines would take years and be costly. For instance, AWS's network cards are quite old, supporting limited bandwidth and computing. This requires a shift of the workload to core compute for faster cycles and upgrades. OCI, by designing from scratch, started with over-provisioned networking to avoid the noisy neighbor problem and used more powerful processors than were available when AWS launched. By the time OCI Gen 2 was developed, data center-class processing power like AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon was available.

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