Oracle to expand automation capabilities across developer cloud services

Last fall at Oracle OpenWorld, chairman Larry Ellison showed he was a man of the people by comparing the company’s new autonomous database service to auto-pilot on his private plane. Regardless, those autonomous capabilities were pretty advanced, providing customers with a self-provisioning, self-tuning and self-repairing database. Today, Oracle announced it was expanding that automation beyond the database to other parts of its developer cloud platform.

The company started with that autonomous database, known by the exciting name, 18C, which like Ellison’s airplane, practically runs itself. “We are extending the automation across all of our cloud platform services, making them self driving, self securing and self repairing and eliminating human requirements to handle all of the [installation], protection and services,” Amit Zavery, executive vice president for the Oracle Cloud Platform told TechCrunch.

The automation will be applied to a broad array of Oracle cloud services including applications development, data integration and security. The new services are designed to remove a significant amount of the complexity and reduce the time and cost associated with launching, running and maintaining cloud services. The goal is to leave it to the machine wherever possible.

Developers still need to do their jobs, but it drastically reduces much of the day-to-day operations and initial tasks, which should increase the efficiency of the IT team, Zavery said. “The time to market, risk and cost come down. The mundane tasks go out of your hands and you can spend more time on the application you want to build,” he explained.

This automation uses a lot of artificial intelligence and machine learning under the hood and should speed up the transition to the cloud for Oracle’s customers. What’s more, the intelligence layer means that technology should improve over time as it learns the intricacies of each customer’s individual requirements.

Ellison founded Oracle in the late 1970s in a very different computing world. Over the last several years, the company has been transitioning to a cloud model, but it was very late to the game and far behind companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM and even Alibaba. Zavery sees this level of automation as a key differentiator between Oracle and its cloud competitors.

The new autonomous services will be rolling out over the first half of this year, Zavery said.