Oracle Demonstrates Advances in Autonomous Cloud, Extending Autonomous Capabilities Across Entire Cloud Platform

Self-driving services use AI and machine learning to help organizations lower cost, reduce risk, accelerate innovation, and get predictive insights

Oracle President of Product Development Thomas Kurian demonstrated the latest advances in Oracle Cloud Platform, expanding its Oracle Cloud Platform Autonomous Services beyond the Oracle Autonomous Database, to make all Oracle Cloud Platform services self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing.  With its enhanced suite of autonomous Cloud Platform services, Oracle is setting a new industry standard for autonomous cloud capabilities.  Oracle is applying AI and machine learning to its entire next-generation Cloud Platform services to help customers lower cost, reduce risk, accelerate innovation, and get predictive insights.

As organizations focus on delivering innovation fast, they want a secure set of comprehensive, integrated cloud services to build new applications and run their most demanding enterprise workloads. Only Oracle’s cloud services can automate key operational functions like tuning, patching, backups and upgrades while running to deliver maximum performance, high availability, and secure enterprise IT systems.  In addition, to accelerate innovation and smarter decision making, Oracle Cloud Platform is incorporating additional autonomous capabilities specific to application development, mobile and bots, app and data integration, analytics, security and management.

“The future of tomorrow’s successful enterprise IT organization is in full end-to-end automation,” said Kurian. “At Oracle, we are making this a reality.  We are weaving autonomous capabilities into the fabric of our cloud to help customers safeguard their systems, drive innovation faster, and deliver the ultimate competitive advantage with smarter real-time decisions.”

Oracle’s autonomous capabilities are integral to the entire Oracle Cloud Platform, including the world’s first autonomous database unveiled at Oracle OpenWorld.  The Oracle Autonomous Database uses advanced AI and machine learning to eliminate human labor, human error and manual tuning delivering unprecedented availability, high performance and security at a much lower cost.  Multiple autonomous database services, each tuned to a specific workload, will be available in 2018, including Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse Cloud Service for analytics, Oracle Autonomous Database OLTP for transactional and mixed workloads, and Oracle Autonomous NoSQL Database for fast, massive-scale reads and writes.

In addition to the Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Cloud Platform autonomous capabilities for application development, mobile and bots, integration, analytics, security and system management, are scheduled to be available in the first half of calendar year 2018.  Oracle Cloud Platform services all share foundational autonomous capabilities including:

• Self-Driving to Lower Costs and Increase Productivity:  Eliminate human labor to provision, secure, monitor, backup, recover and troubleshoot. Automatically upgrade and patch itself while running. Instantly grow and shrink compute or storage without downtime.
• Self-Securing to Lower Risk: Protect from external attacks and malicious internal users. Automatically apply security updates while running to protect against cyberattacks, and automatically encrypt all data.

• Self-Repairing for Higher Availability: Provide automated protection from all planned and unplanned downtime with up to 99.995 percent availability, resulting in less than 2.5 minutes of downtime per month including planned maintenance.

Examples of additional autonomous capabilities being added to functional areas across the rest of the Oracle Cloud Platform include:

Application Development

• Automated artifact discovery, dependency management, and policy-based dependency updates increasing code quality and developer productivity
• Automated identification and remediation of security issues throughout the CI/CD pipeline significantly reducing security risks
• Automated code generation with single button deployment enabling rapid application development even by line of business users

Mobile and Bots

• Self-learning chatbots observing interaction patterns and preferences to automate frequently performed end-user actions freeing up time for higher productivity tasks
• Unsupervised, smart bots using machine learning to learn from user conversations enabling fluid, contextual conversations
• Automated caching of API calls to the nearest data center in real time for lowest latency responses based on end user location

Application and Data Integration

• Self-defining integrations automate business processes across different SaaS and on-premises apps
• Self-defining data flows with automated data lake and data prep pipeline creation for ingesting data (streaming and batch)

Analytics

• Automated data discovery and preparation
• Automated analysis for key findings along with visualization and narration delivering quicker real time insights

Security and Management

• Machine learning-driven user and entity behavior analytics to automatically isolate and eliminate suspicious and malicious users
• Preventative controls to intercept data leaks across structured and unstructured data repositories
• Unified data repository across log, performance, user experience and configuration data with applied AI/ML, eliminating need to set and manage performance and security monitoring “metadata” such as thresholds, server topology, and configuration drift

Oracle today also demonstrated a single Oracle Digital Assistant for users to interact across Oracle’s SaaS and PaaS services including analytics. Oracle Digital Assistant provides centralized connection for the user to converse across the user’s CRM, ERP, HCM, custom applications and business intelligence data and uses AI to intelligently correlate data and automate user behavior. Oracle Digital Assistant capabilities include:

• Integration to speech-based devices like Amazon Echo (Alexa), Apple Siri, Google Home and Speech, Harman Kardon (Cortana), and Microsoft Cortana
• Deep neural net based machine learning algorithms to process the message from the voice based devices to understand end user input and take action
• Intelligent routing to the Bot with the knowledge to process the end user input
• Deep insights into user behavior, context, preferences and routines that is used by the Oracle Digital Assistant to self-learn to recommend and automate across all data sets on behalf of the user

“Platform as a Service has become a critical component of the cloud delivery model to help drive business agility and innovation for enterprises,” said Saurabh Sharma, Principal Analyst, Ovum.  “With Oracle revealing its AI and machine learning-based Autonomous PaaS, Oracle is bringing productivity gains, cost reduction and human error reduction to the forefront of enterprises looking for possible ways to drive faster innovation. Oracle Cloud Platform’s autonomous PaaS capabilities will let enterprises scale, back-up, upgrade, diagnose, correct and secure enterprise PaaS cloud services.”

Source: oracle.com