As theCUBE’s industry analysts traveled the enterprise technology conference circuit this year, they spoke with a lot of companies in the process of developing a service or sets of services, built on hyperscale infrastructure, aimed at abstracting the underlying complexity to create a continuous experience across more than one cloud. Or as theCUBE likes to call it: supercloud.

This means that the core premise of supercloud, albeit under different names, has been slowly evolving in companies across the enterprise technology ecosystem for years.

One example is Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure. Growing out of a partnership first announced in 2019, OCI has evolved to provide users with a common experience across both Microsoft Inc.’s Azure and Oracle Corp.’s Cloud Infrastructure. With last month’s announcement of the Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure, which provides a secure, high-speed database interconnection between the company’s clouds, OCI is meeting the definition of a supercloud.

“At the end of the day, we want to enable true workloads running across two different clouds, where you’re potentially running maybe the app layer in one and the database layer or the back end in another,” said Karan Batta (pictured, left), vice president of product management for OCI at Oracle.

Batta and Kris Rice (right), vice president of software development at Oracle, spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante at Supercloud 22, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed what constitutes a supercloud and how Oracle and Microsoft’s partnership has enabled the companies to create an abstracted environment in which customers can operate on data across clouds.

What’s under the hood of a successful supercloud?

The ability to make calls against one cloud using another cloud’s APIs, peer networks together, and use login credentials across clouds are the hallmarks of a successful supercloud, according to Batta.

And Rice agrees: “It’s more than just making the network bytes flow,” he said, stating that when Oracle set out to create the new Oracle Database Service for Microsoft Azure, the team considered identity, observability and the ability to connect across clouds in a way that felt native in both environments.

Providing a secure private link across 11 regions with two-millisecond data transmission, the service enables customers to run Microsoft applications against data stored in Oracle databases without any loss in efficiency or performance. The engineering behind it started with the goal to provide customers with a fully managed experience, according to Batta.

Under the covers of the Azure-like portal in OCI is a fully managed service that takes Azure primitives as inputs and then translates them to OCI action, according to Batta. The service can call APIs on either cloud and manages Azure resources, creating them and interacting with OCI at the same time.

“We truly integrated this as a service that’s essentially built as a PaaS layer on top of these two clouds,” he said.

How Oracle’s multicloud control manager creates seamless environment between clouds

While the customer intellectually knows that there is a relationship between the two clouds, their interactions are managed through a multicloud control plane that makes it so seamless that “maybe they don’t notice,” Rice stated.

The control plane acts as “the veneer” that makes it possible to join the two clouds together, explained Rice.

“It knows how to take those Azure primitives and the OCI primitives and wire them at the appropriate levels together,” he said.

The combination of this control plane and extremely fast networking means that it’s not important to the workload that it’s spanning two clouds anymore. From a developer’s point-of-view, the control plane will be API drivable from the user interface and will allow them to operate and create primitives across clouds, according to Rice.

“Developers love automation because it makes our lives easy,” he said.

The configuration layer is based on HashiCorp’s Terraform infrastructure as code, which means that “anyone can configure anything,” according to Rice.

“We will be able to automate a multicloud workload, from the ground up … we can configure an entire multicloud experience from one place,” he said.

While Oracle’s supercloud capabilities currently extend out to Azure, the same level of integration could be built into other clouds in the future, according to Batta. And it’s a two-way street, with customers potentially wanting to use other complimentary services within the Oracle Cloud.

“I think it can go both ways,” Batta said. “The market and the customer base will dictate that.” 

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Supercloud 22 event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE