AI-Driven App Development with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Sudha Raghavan

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. Alan Hummel.

We're back here on Techron tv. Welcome. Our next guest is SDA Raghavan.

SDA is the Senior vp, senior vice president, developer platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. sda. Welcome to Text Drunk tv.

It's great to have you on here. Thank you, Alan. Uh, as Alan said, my name is sda.

I am the senior Vice president managing all of Oracle Cloud's developer and container platform. Uh, developer platform is everything that Oracle and its internal and external customers use to store their source code, build it, test it, deploy it, and operate it on Oracle Cloud. In addition, we obviously have a wonderful Oracle managed Kubernetes engine, or OKE, which is our container platform and all of its serverless counterparts, like functions, container instances, and so on.

They also are part of my organization. I have been with Oracle for almost eight years, and I have been in this online industry for over 15 long before we had, uh, cell phone pages. I, I used to carry pagers, uh, long time ago when I was a dev at Microsoft.

Uh, so thank you a for having me on the show. Thank you. Suda, you, you're talking my language.

You know, I got into the online stuff. So I started a company that became a hosting company. 'cause back then they didn't even call it hosting.

I, I thought I was a virtual landlord as people needed more space. I just added more hard drives to my servers. Um, you know, and serving it up over the internet, there was no cloud or anything.

I went from there to a company that became known as inter reliant. And we were an early, what they called a SP, you probably remember these application service providers. Mm-Hmm.

And a actually back then, it is 98, 99, 2000. We were hosting Oracle applications with Oracle database behind it in data centers trying to do it in a shared like multi-tenant when it really wasn't built for that. Right.

There was no cloud, it was none of that. Uh, v you know, VM was just becoming a thing. com era.

Everything went. We wound up going public, the whole story, you know, back then. But yeah, I look back on those days and what were we thinking?

What was I thinking? net. I used to work on IAS, which was the old I remember, I Sure.

Platform. Uh, and so had seen the evolution through all of that. Um, and I used to work on Bing at Microsoft.

I was, uh, oh God, for 14 years. Yeah. Much before Bing was called Bing.

And uh, we didn't have the word cloud. It was our online business. That's how we used to call it.

Um, and uh, you know, we didn't call it data centers. We, uh, you know, just called it hosted by Microsoft. Yeah, Yeah.

You know, things just for our developers, things would quote unquote magically happen. I want a new machine to deploy something. You would get a new machine and underneath people didn't know how, you know, some of the stuff we Were racking and stacking, that's what they would do.

I mean, like the commercial says, we've come a long way, baby. Uh, you know, it's, it's cra I remember those days, man. Hey.

Anyway. Of course the Oracle cloud today, for those who use it, they already know, but it offers, you know, sort of cutting edge functionality that you know, as good as you're going to get in any of the other cloud providers out there. And one of the nice things about Oracle Cloud is they partner with the other big three clouds here in the west, right?

Uh, Microsoft and, and Google and, and AWS. But I wanted to ask you specifically about the Kubernetes OKE is what I think you referred it to. Yeah.

So when looking at OKE versus traditional AppD dev platform, how is is, are, are most of your in new instances now on Kubernetes, or is it the other one? Um, so absolutely right. We, like you said, we are a multi decade company, uh, which means we have applications of all kinds applications built 25 years ago and applications built two days ago.

Uh, all of our AI services, which has been built in the last 12 to 18 months are completely 100% OKE based. Any cloud native application that we build in on our cloud, both internally as well as what our customers build, are primarily built on container platforms. And OKE or Kubernetes is the most used container platform out there, and we are no different.

So our developers also do exactly what all the other cloud native developers do, which is don't think about the infrastructure below Kubernetes. That is somebody else's problem. Uh, I build, deploy a container and you know, I say scale it on these dimensions, it will scale.

I say, you know, when it's broken, take it out of rotation, bring a new pod up and run it. So just like a lot of our cloud native developers out there, Oracle developers also get all the benefits of the platform. The advantages for, uh, you mentioned, you know, we partner with a lot of, or all the other major cloud service providers including AWS most recently.

What that gives both our internal and external developers, the ability to do is think multi-Cloud Kubernetes is a standard platform. Doesn't matter which cloud provider you are. If you follow Kubernetes primitives, your applications can seamlessly move from one cloud to another.

In today's world, nobody wants to put all their eggs in one basket, which means nobody wants to put everything in one cloud service provider, whether it is for DR purposes, price purposes, whatever it is that you choose to do, uh, you do want that sort of ubiquitous platform that can run seamlessly from any cloud service provider, not just cloud provider. A lot of our companies, like I said, our partners, our customers are all decades old enterprises. They don't, as they wanna move to the cloud, they cannot move everything in one step.

So they have a very, very formalized, what they call hybrid cloud, which is part of their inflow is on-prem, part of them is on the cloud. And even for the part that is on the cloud, they're multi-cloud. So it's like really, really hyped.

And with Oracle database on, whether it's Azure, GCP or AWS, we make it very easy for our customers to, as seamlessly as possible, migrate their applications and then help them in their journey towards cloud native. Because we apply a lot of open source standards. So when, what we have seen is a lot of enterprise companies, a lot of our customers and our partners, as they try to move to the cloud, they are looking at what is most widely used for companies like them, for people with their portfolio, what is being used.

And as we all know, I'm coming out of CubeCon and I think so are you, we all know, yes, Kubernetes and all the open source has become defacto. That is where the industry is going. That is where the talent is.

So if you wanna get talent in and you wanna build these cloud native applications really quickly, you do have to use as much open source as possible and as as much of knowledge base that people have gained with ears of experience. So you can quickly make the transition and you don't have to learn the same mistakes with your own experience, just use the experts and do the thing that's already prevalent. So we're seeing a lot of our customers use open source technologies, use Kubernetes technologies to come and do their application development on our platform.

Uh, now Oracle Cloud, our strength is our price for performance. Whether you are talking GPUs, whether you are talking CPUs, whether you're talking our app infrastructure application layer on Kubernetes, any other software that we as Oracle Cloud provide our, um, egress is free for up to 10, um, terabytes per month. With all of that flexibility and price for performance, we are seeing a lot more customers, customers who were not thinking of cloud.

These are our traditional companies that have grown on-prem, also wanna attempt to come to the cloud. And that's a wonderful journey that we've seen. Not only are we seeing that in North America, we're seeing it across the globe in a lot of other countries.

There has been, and you spoke about multi-tenancy, right? A lot of these companies, sovereign governments, they actually don't want multi-tenant that's act, even though our software can provide it very seamlessly, they don't want it because they're still wary of, oh, what if a competitor should slide right next to us and there's some leak or whatever it is. So we at Oracle Cloud provide our customers a wide variety of choices.

Uh, anything from three racks called public cloud only for you as a tenant to thousands of racks. Truly a public cloud, multi-tenant region. You as a customer can choose.

We provide all services, everything everywhere. As a customer, you get to pick, do I want to be a single tenant, my own dedicated region cloud, or do I want to be a customer in a public cloud region? It doesn't matter what you pick as your infrastructure footprint, we will give you all services everywhere for the same price.

And that is something amazing that our competitors do not offer their customers everything everywhere. I Love that. It's very important.

I I think it's important to note too, though, that what allows you to do that sort of portability is Kubernetes, is that cloud native infrastructure, right? Because whether you're running KU coupon on bare metal back at your own data center or KU in the Oracle cloud, or Kubin AWS or Microsoft or what have you. If you, if you using as you, I forgot the term of art, you used coup primitive or no, what was, what, what did you mention?

Uh, primary kuber, like it is No, no. The, the Blake's following best practices in Kubernetes open Source best practices, irrespective of the cloud. You are using, using use standards, open source standards.

And that's what allows this, right? That's what allow. Now there are some companies, I'm not mentioning names, they always try to tweak things they embrace and extend was the word we used to use, remember?

And um, and that makes it harder though, to then you lose that portability. Yep. You locked in, You you locked in, or you have to add all these proxies, uh, which, you know, adds more latency, requires more CPU, your high throughput applications can't work like that.

It is actually difficult. In fact, Oracle Cloud, even when we started, we had always snapped to open standards whenever we could. 0 standard to allow for seamless event movement because a lot of cloud native platforms are event event.

So you need to know when an event that occurs somewhere do something else somewhere else as a function, as a pipeline, right? And so, so we adapted to that standard logging open search as the standard for, um, um, you know, uh, search based, uh, databases, um, and, and logs, right? So a lot of places OKE of course, uh, snapping to open source, uh, Kubernetes, right?

Lots of places we actually built for standards. One of the reasons I am part of the CNCF board, and one of the reasons Oracle got into back CNCF F board is because C'S mission is to make things a lot more standardized so that everybody can use the innovations without having to pay the price for, like you said, you know, specializing it to that innovation, to that cloud. So I'm very, very happy to see us be pioneers.

In fact, Oracle cloud was the first one to start this multi-cloud journey when we established our relationship with Azure. And then now, today everybody is doing that because that's where, you know, people are going, that's what our customers wants, That well, that's where the market is. Exactly.

And that's something people miss. I think people always thought they'd be hybrid cloud, keep some stuff in my data center, some stuff in the cloud. The idea of having my stuff in multiple clouds wasn't a apparent at, at the beginning, but now it's, when you look at it now, it's obvious, right?

Yes. Why should I be locked in? Yep.

Why? Right. Put all my eggs in one basket.

Why should I do that? And each of the clouds does, they all have their little specialties that they do a little better than the next guy, you know? And so you pick the right tool for the job, which is the way it should be.

Exactly. And, and you know, with GPUs now, it's also constrained on infrastructure. Who has them, who has, Has them, right.

Either it's just, And Who could cool 'em down? That's the other Big thing. Exactly.

We're doing liquid cooling now. Who, who has thought, you know? Uh, crazy people building cloud.

Crazy have to figure out liquid cooling. We had some people last week, they were at the SC 24 event, supercomputing event in Atlanta. And that's, that was the rage.

They had all these cy well they had two quantum computers there too, but they had all these computers set up with liquid cooling for the GPUs. It's nuts when you think about it, you wore at CubeCon. What'd you think of CubeCon this year?

Oh, CubeCon has always been amazing. This is my fourth CubeCon. And uh, there's so much energy always around, Always a lot of energy.

Last time when I was in Paris, it was all about ai. This time around it was all about interestingly, thin ops and a lot of observability. So, uh, everybody obviously onboarded onto this AI bandwagon.

Everybody has GPUs whether they want it or not. And finally it started pinching their bottom line and they're like, okay, how do I use this GPU that I bought with so much money? And how do I control my costs?

Yeah, exactly. Though, I have to tell you, salt Lake City was a great host for, for CubeCon, but I really loved Paris. Oh Yeah, of course.

It's Paris. You Can't, Paris was a great backdrop for that, for that event. Yeah, of course.

London, it'll be coming up next. Japan. Japan in the summer.

Yes, I think, right? Yes. India is coming up.

Yes. I wanna go To that one in a, in a couple weeks being part of the board. I get privy to everything that's going on.

India is on December 11th as 12th. Yes. They're doing the very first one in India.

Yes, you did. That'll be interesting as well. Anyway, sda, what a pleasure having you on here.

Thank you so much. And thank you for all you do. It's the NCF and thank Oracle for all they do.

It's the NCF, it's supporting these community, uh, initiatives because look, we all win, right? That rising tide lifts all these boats. Absolutely.

Absolutely. But if you don't have the Oracles of the world and the Googles and the AWSs and the Microsoft's even involved in it, you, you just don't get that breath, if you will. So, absolute thank you.

Thank you for all you guys do. Come back and visit us soon. Maybe next thing live at Q com.

We'll see you. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Alan, again for having me on the show.

And I do hope to see you at coupon London. Absolutely. I'll be there.

All righty. Scooter Raghavan, senior vs. Raghavan, senior Vice President, develop a platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure here on Techstrong tv.

We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.