Oracle Database@AWS: Unleashing new era of data unification and AI innovation

Oracle and Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced the general availability of Oracle Database@AWS. This offering will allow customers to run Oracle Exadata Database Service and Oracle Autonomous Database directly on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) within AWS regions.

The initial rollout of Oracle Database@AWS is generally available in the AWS U.S. East (N. Virginia) and U.S. West (Oregon) Regions, with ambitious plans for rapid global expansion. They are also significantly focused on the Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ) markets, with planned launches in Hyderabad and Mumbai in India, along with Osaka, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Melbourne, ensuring comprehensive coverage across key APJ geographies within the year.

This is a strategic partnership in a direct response to customer demand. As Luke Andreson of AWS highlighted in an exclusive interaction with Dataquest, “Fundamentally, this initiative is driven by customer demand; over 90% of our features and services originate from direct customer feedback."

Unifying data and simplifying operations

Oracle Database@AWS addresses a critical challenge faced by many large enterprises, especially those in regulated industries like financial services and insurance, where there is a need to unify data experiences rather than managing disparate data stores across multiple platforms.

Kambiz Aghili, Senior Vice President, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, elaborated on the strategic significance, stating, "This is the first time that customers who love AWS and love Oracle technology will have access to the native Oracle hardware and software operating natively from inside AWS data centres." He emphasised that 80% of mission-critical workloads still reside on-premises, often struggling with inefficient operations when running on VMs or infrastructure in third-party clouds. Oracle Database@AWS aims to resolve this by providing native Exadata hardware and software (including the latest X11M hardware and database versions 19c and 23ai) physically running inside AWS data centres, ensuring "best-in-class throughput and IOPS."

One of the key technical differentiator in this alliance is the zero-ETL (extract, transform, and load) integration. This feature simplifies data integration between Oracle Database services and AWS Analytics services, eliminating the need for complex data pipelines. This allows data to flow seamlessly, empowering customers to combine their Oracle data with AWS analytics, machine learning, and generative AI services for deeper and enhanced applications.

Aghili also pointed to the unified security, governance, access controls, and networking as a major benefit. "Instead of having to manage the AWS fleet separately from the Oracle fleet or handling security and access control separately, we are making these services natively available to operate together." This unified governance can turn out to be a crucial benefit for regulated industries and simplifies management across multi-cloud environments.

Generative AI strategies

The partnership is particularly timely given the explosion of interest in generative AI. Customers today are increasingly recognising the critical role of data in producing trustworthy AI outcomes. Oracle Database@AWS can empower them to unlock greater value from their mission-critical transactional data stored in Oracle Exadata and Autonomous Databases, integrating it seamlessly with data from other AWS sources like DynamoDB, Redshift, and S3, including Apache Iceberg tables.

With this powerful new offering, Oracle and AWS are not just delivering a product; they are delivering on a critical customer need, paving the way for a more integrated, efficient, and AI-ready future for enterprise data.