Oracle’s Larry Ellison and AWS CEO Matt Garman will share the stage in Vegas today to announce an unlikely partnership that will bring Oracle Database to rival AWS via a new “Oracle Database@AWS” offering.
This will hit public preview later in 2024 with broader availability in 2025 and include the option to run Oracle Exadata (which has heavy dependency on Oracle for hardware deployment and maintenance) inside or at least closely adjacent to AWS data centre racks via “a low latency network connection between Oracle databases and applications on AWS.”
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The move follows previously announced partnerships with Azure and GCP (the latter now GA) and comes as Oracle revealed that cloud services was now its largest business; delivering it $5.6 billion in revenues in 2025’s Q1.
Ellison and Amazon’s leaders have traded barbs over the years, but 2018 – when Amazon abandoned Oracle databases after some Ellison trolling and the two companies feuded publicly – appears to be ancient history. Garman and Ellison will keynote alongside guests at Oracle’s CloudWorld summit on Tuesday to discuss more details of their new partnership.
Here’s what The Stack can already reveal…
Oracle Database@AWS gets cosy...
Oracle Database@AWS will bake Oracle’s widely used Database into AWS using “dedicated infrastructure and workloads running on Oracle Real Application Clusters” and provide “Zero-ETL integration between Oracle Database services and AWS Analytics services” with the ability to spin up Oracle services via AWS Management Console, CLI, or CloudFormation.
Critically, customers will be able to buy Oracle Database services using existing AWS commitments and use existing Oracle license benefits, including Bring Your Own License and its customer discount programmes.
"“We are seeing huge demand from customers that want to use multiple clouds. To meet this demand and give customers the choice and flexibility they want, Amazon and Oracle are seamlessly connecting AWS services with the very latest Oracle Database technology, including the Oracle Autonomous Database. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure deployed inside of AWS datacenters, we can provide customers with the best possible database and network performance.” – Larry Ellison
"First Microsoft, then Google, and now AWS. It is amazing that all three of these cloud providers have launched Oracle Database@xxx services that involve the deployment of Oracle hardware in their datacenters" noted IDC's Dave McCarthy.
"This is an indicator of two things. First, customer loyalty to Oracle Database is impressive. Second, no cloud has been able to replicate the on-premises performance and feature set of Oracle Database without Oracle hardware. This is an amazing development for Oracle customers. Previously, the only place they could go was OCI. Now, they have a choice of all the major clouds. I suspect this will unlock a new wave of cloud migrations from on-premises Oracle environments. This gives customers a no-comprise experience to running Oracle in the cloud while providing the ability to use adjacent AI services like Amazon Bedrock" McCarthy added.
Oracle quoted Andrew Zitney, State Street’s Global CTO as saying that "by moving Oracle Exadata Database workloads to AWS, we will be able to unlock new innovation and value we can deliver to customers…”
A press release did not reveal if Zitney was specifically keeping those workloads on Oracle or just moving them to another alternative AWS service, i.e. refactoring them to run on Aurora (something that AWS has previously suggested as among the options for Exadata uses); we hope that it wouldn’t have made a press release if the latter were the case!*
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Ellison had told analysts on the company’s June 2024 earnings call that “we're thrilled to.. be building OCI data centers right inside of Azure so the computers are next to each other to minimize network costs and network latency, which is all good things. We're doing the same thing with Google.
“We would love to do the same thing with AWS.”
In other news from Oracle’s summit in Vegas this week – The Stack is on the ground and will have more updates in coming days; we will also update this story after the keynote – the company announced the general availability of Oracle Database@Google Cloud, and revealed that finance firm MSCI has moved its Exadata environment to Oracle Database@Azure.
