The services in Oracle Corp.’s cloud platform will soon tune and patch themselves.

That’s thanks to a push announced by the company today to extend the technology behind its recently introduced “autonomous” relational database service to the rest of the offerings in the lineup. Oracle said specialized machine learning models optimize performance, implement updates as they become available and even perform troubleshooting when needed. There’s also a backup tool for protecting records from outages.

Oracle plans to bring the technology first and foremost to the other databases it offers alongside the autonomous relational store. Self-driving versions of the company’s cloud-based data warehouse, NoSQL store and OLTP (online transaction processing) services are set to launch this year.

Oracle said automating key maintenance tasks will cut the amount of person-hours enterprises must expend to use the offerings. By extension, the autonomous features should also reduce the risk posed by human error. Oracle promised that the end result will be a higher level of reliability.

The company plans to put its money where its mouth is by providing service-level agreements to ensure operational standards are met. Specifically, Oracle will offer guarantees around uptime, manageability, and performance. If database speeds, as an example, drop below a given threshold for a certain period of time, the company will give the affected customers credits they can redeem against their cloud bill.

The new database features are set to be joined by more specialized automation tools for the other services in Oracle’s public cloud. One upcoming capability, for instance, will identify vulnerable code in enterprise software projects. Another addition is set to introduce “self-defining” integrations for connecting different applications. These capabilities are scheduled to roll out in the first half of this year.

On top of the feature set, Oracle is also extending its cloud platform’s physical reach. The company intends to open no fewer than 12 new data centers as part of the expansion plan. Oracle will build two cloud facilities in the US and another pair in Canada, while the rest are set to be constructed overseas. The locations on the expansion roadmap include the Netherlands, Switzerland, China, India, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and South Korea.

Oracle needs to catch up to cloud rivals, which are also building new data centers to strengthen their grip on the market. Moreover, they’re continuing to grow rapidly on the revenue front. Amazon.com Inc. said last week that its Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud unit is at a $20 billion annual revenue run rate, and Google LLC said its cloud revenue has reached a billion dollars a quarter.

Moreover, they’re spending big bucks on building the infrastructure needed to keep that momentum going. Some 19 cloud service providers spent $63.8 billion on data centers and other cloud infrastructure in 2017, according to RBC Capital Markets numbers cited in the Wall Street Journal, up 22 percent from  2016. This year, that’s set to rise 27 percent, to more than $81 billion.

And Oracle is sure to see more competition specifically for making cloud operations more automated.

“Oracle came late to cloud, and who comes late must have some serious point of attraction to get attention of the party goers. Self driving or autonomous as Oracle calls it definitively has that – so, well done,” said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc. “Remarkably the usual competitors have not yet matched the Oracle vision. But it’s early in the year and I expect similar offerings from all infrastructure and platform players to come out later this year.”

And it’s not yet apparent that Oracle itself can deliver everything it’s promising. “It has to go back to the drawing board and bolt on machine learning capabilities to realize the vision of a self-driving stack as well as fundamentally changing how software is created, integrated and, last but not least, how data is moved, interfaced and analyzed,” Mueller said.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Image: Oracle