Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Quick Start

I am so, so very excited to announce the launch of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Quick Start program. This is an informal announcement. We should have a formal blog post and PR following shortly.

The 22 initial Quick Start examples are available on GitHub here. They are a collection of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) examples, specifically Terraform, and walk throughs that allow our customers to get started using partner products on both OCI and OKE (our Kubernetes managed service) really easily. Our 15 launch partners for the Quick Start are:

• ArangoDB
• Cloudera
• Cockroach Labs
• Couchbase
• Confluent
• DataStax
• Elastic
• H2O.ai
• Hazelcast
• Kinetica
• MapR
• Neo4j
• StreamSets
• Tableau
• WANdisco

There are an enormous number of very talented people we got to work with on this. Looking at the time stamps on commits, the very first one was made by Gilbert Lau at DataStax on April 8, 2017. There are key players who've assisted at all our partners. A partial list of those I've had great pleasure working with includes AJ Kreshock, Pratap Ramamurthy, Alan Anderson, Samm DiStasio, Andy Ross, Matt McDonough, Anil Kumar, Andy Schwaderer, Logan Smith, Mike Carley, Eric Goldstein and Tom Luckenbach.

People change companies an enormous amount in this industry. The standup players remain the same and show up again and again, adding value in different places. Even in the short time I've been working on this program, those moves have happened. Our team recognizes the importance of nurturing and maintaining these relationships. I look forward to working with these people, and others I've forgotten to mention here, for years to come in a variety of capacities. Work is enjoyable in large part because of the relationships you develop. After all, if you're going to spend a large part of your life doing something, you may as well do it with friends.

We also got a lot of help from people at Oracle to put this together. Rob Dolin was instrumental in helping me navigate the intricacies of a large company. Without him the Quick Start would not exist. Beyond that our partner architect team has put hands on keyboards, working with architects at our partners. Those people are Oguz Pastirmaci, Collin Poczatek, Zach Smith and Pinkesh Valdria. Michal Jakóbczyk has been a great resource for ideas, feedback and some (as yet!) unpublished work as well. I hear he has a solid book on OCI coming out shortly...

Other clouds have programs similar to OCI Quick Start. I, of course, believe our program is a bit unique. Each project gets its own repo. This is important as users can open issues, PR the repo and fork them. Our partners are contributors on these repos and we work closely with them on development. With this initial launch both Oracle and partner architects worked on development. Going forward we hope to collaborate with our customers on these repos as well.

Getting these published has been quite a process. Oracle is by far the largest company I've ever worked for. We have over 138,000 employees! Prior to this the biggest company I ever worked at was Software AG at a mere 5,500. And, that was more or less an accident as I intended to work for a much small acquisition, Terracotta. Much of my career has been spent working at companies in the 5-500 employee range. I'd sold to large banks and partnered with hyper scale cloud providers. But, before this, I'd never been on the inside. It's a different experience.

Bigger companies have more scale. When they choose to move into a business, the machinery they bring to do that is impressive. At the same time, it takes longer to bring that machinery to bear on a problem. Much of my last six months at Oracle has been spent trying to point that machine at the problem of firing up a partner ecosystem on OCI. With our Quick Start, I think we've taken a significant step toward that. The program is the result of alignment between multiple groups across the business. With that alignment in place, I think we're well positioned to provide our customers a lot of value. I'm looking forward to seeing what the lawnmower does now that we have it pointed in a promising direction.

On other clouds, the Quick Start program is distinct from marketplace. At OCI we're viewing Quick Start as an incubator. We're planning to recruit ISVs and partner with them on building Terraform integrations in Quick Start that deploy their products on OCI. With that work in place, we plan to use that same Terraform as the basis for OCI Marketplace offers. That makes it easier for customers to adopt partner solutions on OCI. At the same time it simplifies maintenance, meaning ISVs spend less effort maintaining IaC, resulting in a higher quality experience for end users. All this results in multiple virtuous cycles, benefit our customers, partners and our core business. You should see more on that in the next few weeks.

We also have some really neat stuff coming with the Quick Starts. This includes a wider array of partner products. We're planning a deploy button that interfaces directly with Oracle Resource Manager, our Terraform as a service offering. Andy Day built a really awesome prototype of that. I can't wait to see it live. Stay tuned!