Fast Track Multi-Cloud Adoption With Oracle Cloud And Microsoft Azure

Oracle cloud infrastructure recently announced the general availability of additional two or more regions connecting Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.

Before we deep dive into what is Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure interconnect, Let’s first understand the need for multi-cloud adoption and its benefits.

Multi-cloud strategy enables enterprise organizations to select different services from different cloud providers to get hybrid benefits from the cloud providers. Major reasons for organizations to implement multi-cloud environment is as follows :

• Choice
  Multi-cloud environment gives the flexibility to avoid vendor lock-in and dependency with specific cloud providers.
• Avoid Disaster Avoidance
  Outages can happen due to natural disasters or can also be through human error. Multiple cloud environments ensure that compute resources and data storage are available without any downtime.
• Compliance
  Multi-cloud environment helps enterprises achieve their goals for governance, risk management, and regulatory compliance.

Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure Interconnect

With Oracle cloud and Microsoft Azure Interconnect, enterprise organizations can choose simple migration path to a multi-cloud environment which includes Oracle Database capabilities such as Exadata Cloud Service, MySQL, etc. Customers can innovate using the best of Oracle Cloud infrastructure and Microsoft Azure.

Benefits

• Combine capabilities of two cloud vendors
  Innovate your cloud solutions with the best combination of oracle and Microsoft’s cloud service and features, performance & pricing.
   
• Use secure, private and low-latency connectivity
  OCI & Microsoft Azure provides <2ms latency for multi-cloud network performance.
   
• Run Azure based applications with high speed oracle database
  Maximize application performance by connecting to oracle database, Exadata cloud services, and MySQL.
   
• Unify Data Management across cloud
  Run applications oracle E-business suite, OCI with distributed data store.

Courtesy: https://www.oracle.com/cloud/azure-interconnect/

There are more than 150+ best practice designs to use as a reference to create wide range of workloads from enterprise apps to HPC and from microservices to data lake.

Refer this page for more info: https://docs.oracle.com/solutions/?q=&cType=reference-architectures%2Csolution-playbook%2Cbuilt-deployed&sort=date-desc&lang=en

After understanding the need for multi-cloud environment and fundamentals of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Let’s understand the end-to-end implementation.

• We can use the direct interconnection between the Azure Express Route and Oracle Fast Connect to establish the high-bandwidth, private and low-latency connection between the application and database layer.
• We can also integrate the Oracle applications with Azure Active Directory to setup single-sign on to login to Oracle applications using Azure AD credentials.

OCI Fast connect

It is a network connectivity alternative for using the public internet to connect your network to OCI and other cloud services.

It provides an easy, elastic and economical way to create dedicated and private connection with higher bandwidth options.

Express Route

We can connect Microsoft Azure virtual network with Oracle Cloud infrastructure virtual cloud network (VCN) to run the oracle E-business suite on Microsoft azure.

Image source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en/azure

Connection setup

• Log in to the Azure Portal and create a virtual network with a subnet.
• Create a virtual network gateway in Azure.
  
  
   
• Create a Virtual Machine.
• Verify the ExpressRoute deployment.
• Log in to Oracle Cloud and Create a Virtual Cloud Network. When creating the VCN, ensure that the IP address space in the OCI virtual cloud network does not overlap with the Azure virtual network’s private IP address space. Create a regional Subnet and select defaults for Route Table and Security List.
• Create a Fast Connect connection and select Microsoft Azure: ExpressRoute as the PROVIDER and copy the Service Key from Azure ExpressRoute for the PROVIDER SERVICE KEY.

• Create a NSG to allow SSH or ping from Azure VNet to the OCI compute instance. Then, assign the network security group to the compute instance that you created previously.
• Verify that the Fast Connect connection state is Provisioned.
• Verify that the Azure ExpressRoute provider status is Provisioned and the peering's display.

Conclusion

In this article, we understood the overview of the connection setup from Microsoft Azure to OCI. After we establish the connection, we can use the compute instance provisioned on both clouds to install Oracle related products, with application services running on the Azure Cloud and database services running on Oracle Cloud.