I was originally expecting to start Tuesday with the Cloud Native hands-on-lab, but it clashed with some other non-conference stuff I had scheduled, so I had to drop out of that. I played catch-up on blog posts and upgraded VirtualBox right before my demo, then went out to a photo shoot. Yes, I’m a model…
I had to get some shots done for a magazine piece, so Oracle arranged for me to meet a photographer and I spent some time looking off into the distance in a contemplative manner. I was going to say, “proper executive stuff”, but I was in a T-shirt and combats, so I looked my normal scruffy self. I’ve asked him to photoshop the hell out of them. If I’m recognisable, I won’t be happy. 🙂 I’m not normally at home in front of a camera, but it was surprisingly good fun. On Monday I spent 3 hours running crowd control for the photographer in the Groundbreakers Hub. On Tuesday I’m in front of the camera. I guess by Wednesday I’ll be running a production company…
From there I went straight to my “The 7 Deadly Sins of SQL” session. It covers things that are already on my website, but I’ll write a post specifically about it when I get home. I was surprised how many people showed up. It was a pretty full room. A few empty seats, but a few people standing at the back. The session clashed with the keynote, and a bunch of other sessions I would happily have attended if I wasn’t speaking, so I expected low numbers. Thanks to everyone who came. I hope you got something out of it.
I bumped into Don Sullivan from VMware and chatted to him about the impact of the Oracle & VMware announcement. Since the announcement of VMware Cloud Foundation on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure I’ve already seen some people write, “Oracle is now supported on VMware”, which makes me mad, as it has been supported for a looooong time. Plenty of people run Oracle tech on VMware and never get any problems accessing support. I’m one of those people. If nothing else, the announcement from Oracle will finally kill the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) around this subject. The announcement does allow Oracle to take a piece of the pie as far a running VMware on the cloud, since VMware have already got all the other major players in the bag. I think this hybrid cloud approach will help many companies start their journey to the cloud, regardless of the cloud provider they pick to do it with.
From there I moved on to watch “The State of the Penguin” by Wim CoeKaerts, which is his yearly review of what’s happening in Linux and Virtualisation at Oracle.
If you’ve watched any of the announcements, I guess you know that Autonomous Linux was announced. I’m going to miss out a bunch of stuff for sure, but some interesting points coming out of this presentation were.
- UEK6 is on the way, and will bring UEK to Oracle Linux 8 (OL8) for the first time.
- The new Exadata X8M, which has the PMEM and RoCE stuff is shipping with KVM. The existing stuff and non-RoCE stuff is still shipping with the Xen hypervisor, but the future for Oracle’s visualisation thrust is KVM. If anyone is starting something new and thinking of picking the Xen-based OVM, you should probably not. 🙂
- For ages Ksplice has been available to folks running Oracle Linux in the Oracle Cloud, as the license is baked in. This is now also the case when running Oracle Linux in Azure.
- The plan is to make much of the Autonomous Linux stuff available for on-prem customers too. Wim repeatedly stated, what you have on-prem is what they run in the Oracle Cloud, and what you run in Azure etc. Most of their work is on upstream Linux, rather than on their own proprietary stuff, so everyone benefits from Oracle’s OSS contributions.
- They are working on some stuff to simplify the setup and management of Kubernetes. It will be open sourced and accept community contributions once it goes to GitHub.
After that session I headed down to the Groundbreaker Hub and just hung around chatting to people. I also did a 60 second Periscope, which is much scarier than a 45 minute presentation. 🙂
This was the first evening I had free. I stuck by my guns and said no to every offer. I went back to my room and crashed! Tomorrow (Wednesday) is my last day at the conference, as I leave on Thursday morning…
When I get home I’ll probably write a series of posts about the Free Tier stuff. I’ve already written about many of the components included in the Free Tier offering individually (ADW, ATP, OCI Compute etc.), along with the supporting stuff (Compartments, Virtual Cloud Networks (VCNs), Firewall stuff etc.), but it would be good to give it a consistent story for people who are fresh into Oracle Cloud, even if it’s just links to what I already have, with some updated screen shots. I’ll sign up with a new account and go through it all from scratch.
I’ve had a number of discussions about the new Oracle branding, which is a lot softer than the previous branding and almost devoid of red. It’s been mostly positive, but one comment that keeps coming up is something along the lines of, “The new branding is supposed to be more customer focused, but that’s not going to go very far if the attitude of “the business” doesn’t change!” I think you know what that means, and I have to agree. Most people don’t have an issue the tech side of Oracle, but do have a big problem trusting the business side of Oracle. Let’s hope this branding change is the beginning of a new era on the business side of things too!
Cheers
Tim…
The cynic in me is thinking that the whole “Oracle is now supported on VMware” headline is simply to trick unsuspecting organisations into doing so, and then hit them with a licensing audit the moment an SR gets raised where the underlying infrastructure is VMware.
I hope that’s not the case and that we’ll see some updates to the CPU core licensing model and hardware partitioning documents imminently, but at this time running an Enterprise Oracle product on VMware should still be done with caution – unless you’ve got very deep pockets !
Rob: Let’s see what comes out of the deal. Maybe it’s just words. Maybe it’s something substantial. 🙂
Cheers
Tim…