About the Advantages of Migrating Custom Applications to Oracle Cloud
To ensure that these custom applications can continue to support your organization, you are considering migrating them to the cloud to better align the applications with your strategic, financial and operational goals:
| Business Goal | Business Driver | Migration Goal |
|---|---|---|
| Strategic | Introduce more products, take them to market faster, respond faster to changes in requirements. | Improved Agility, Rapid Innovation |
| Financial | Reduce over-provisioning, and move from fixed to variable costs, lowering total cost of ownership. | Pay-As-You-Go, Elastic Scaling |
| Business Operations | Reduce risk of interrupting business operations, recover faster from outages and failures. | Reduced Risk, Increased Insights |
| IT Operations | Automate standard operations, redirect IT to support higher value business processes. | Repeatable Best Practices (IaC) |
As you are evaluating your options you want to ensure that a migration can be executed without business interruption and will lead to your projected goals in the least amount of time.
Value Proposition
Custom database applications can be migrated to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with minimal re-architecture, re-integration or business process changes, and will result in a solution that is more flexible, more reliable, and delivers higher performance at a lower cost than deployments running on-premises or with other cloud providers.
Oracle has validated solutions to accomplish these goals, quickly and reliably. It includes procedures, supporting services, and reference architectures. These consider real production needs, including security, network configuration, high availability, disaster recovery, identity integration, and cost management. With these validated solutions, you can take advantage of:
- 21 – 56% lower TCO than on-premises and other clouds
- ”Bring-Your-Own-License” (BYOL) to protect your investment in on-premises databases
- Security-first design from the core to the edge
- A full portfolio of cloud-native tools to boost developer productivity
- Support for all major application platforms, including JavaEE and WebLogic
- Fine-grained infrastructure and application monitoring
- The most comprehensive database service options in the industry
- The only public cloud infrastructure with performance SLAs
Total Cost of Ownership Analysis
Beyond the benefits of being straightforward to migrate, easier to manage, and more flexible to scale, running custom applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is cheaper than running it on-premises or in another cloud system.
The estimated total cost of ownership (TCO) of this solution can be 56% less than running custom applications on-premises, and 21% cheaper than running on another cloud, based on:
- Significant savings from eliminating upfront hardware, ongoing facilities, IT administration and support costs
- Oracle's significant cost advantages for Block Volumes and Database storage
- Assuming six environment, 24 vCPU per environment cloud deployments
- Compared to a six server, 28 cores per environment on-premises deployments
Customer Success Stories
Every day, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers experience great success upon migrating their custom applications to Oracle Cloud. Here are some success stories.
CMiC is a construction software firm that has been providing their Enterprise and Field solution to their customers for nearly 40 years, and today 27% of Engineering News-Record top 100 contractors use CMiC software. Built on an Oracle stack, this single-database platform solution provides the ability for customers to manage entire construction projects from concept to completion. They have consolidated their on-premises and Amazon Web Services applications on to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. They chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its performance, security, and because it offers the best support for Oracle databases.
Allianz Technology is the technology provider for the global financial services company Allianz Group, which has annual revenues of $130 billion. They have extensive business intelligence operations using the SAS application suite, MicroStrategy, custom applications, and Exadata for data persistence. They were looking to migrate these applications to the cloud to be able to build new functionality faster, increase the elasticity of their infrastructure, and to reduce their overall cost. It was critical to them that their cloud solution provide Exadata-as-a-Service. Another critical requirement was that they could build the infrastructure with Terraform. They chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and worked closely with Oracle services to execute the project. They are expecting to see significantly reduced cost of ownership as a result of the move.
CERN is a European research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. They migrated their WebLogic infrastructure for mission-critical Java applications to Docker and Kubernetes on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Doing so allowed them to reduce their maintenance work so they could focus more on development work. It used to take them a half day to deploy a WebLogic cluster, after the migration that was reduced to 2 minutes. Using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure also allowed them to also add new Disaster Recovery options. Alberto Di Meglio, Head of the CERN OpenLab, expects that most, if not all, of their applications will be moved to the cloud.
Benefits of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers unique services, infrastructure capabilities, tools, and support that are optimized for migrating custom applications running on Oracle databases.
- Guaranteed performance and cost-savings: There are significant performance benefits when you run your custom applications on Oracle’s cloud. Our unique non-oversubscribed networks and single-tenant offerings like bare metal compute and Exadata ensure consistent performance that surpass the performance of our customers’ dedicated data centers. Unlike other clouds, we also offer service level agreements to back up our performance guarantees. In addition, many services run cheaper, and to preserve your existing investments, you can also bring existing database licenses to Oracle’s cloud.
- Security from the core to the edge: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides enterprise grade security at every level of the stack, to ensure user isolation, data encryption at every stage of the life cycle, fine-grained security controls, compliance, and visibility through comprehensive log data and monitoring solutions. When you move your applications to Oracle Cloud you can control your security as well as, or better than your on-premises infrastructure.
- Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure supports many forms of automation and managed services to make development teams
more productive. These cloud-native services include:
- Resource Manager to support managing IT infrastructure as code for increased flexibility and reliability.
- Monitoring for tracking infrastructure and application metrics.
- Grafana for visualization of infrastructure and application status.
- Events to detect and act upon life-cycle events of any of your infrastructure resources and services.
- Every application that is migrated to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will immediately yield benefits because of these services, and additional capabilities such as native Streaming, Notification, Container management and more, can support initiatives to create enhancements that are not feasible on-premises.
- Many business applications use JavaEE and WebLogic for their core functionality. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers migration support for these application stacks, including bring-your-own-license migrations, automated deployments of reference architectures for WebLogic 11.x and 12.x, and migrations to managed containerized infrastructure using the WebLogic Kubernetes Operator.
- Oracle offers the most comprehensive database migration services in the industry, so there will be one that exactly matches your requirements. From simple backup and restore with RMAN to Zero Downtime migrations, and from Gigabytes over secure VPNs to Terabytes over dedicated lines, and Petabytes using Data Transfer Appliances, we offer self-service and guided solutions for every scenario and use-case.
Migration Scenarios
Depending on your priorities, you may choose from a few different approaches to migrating your on-premises applications to the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides reference architectures that support a broad spectrum of options.
There are many factors that can impact the optimum migration path from on-premises to cloud:
Is the application complete, requires few updates, and has a fixed workload?
“Lift and Shift” is an approach that makes as few changes to the infrastructure as possible. It reduces the chances of introducing differences in behavior, while still delivering the cloud benefits of improved performance from using the best hardware, storage and networking, as well as the financial benefits of moving from a capex to an opex model. Improve the database by moving to a managed version of Oracle database, improving reliability and reducing admin workload.
Is the application still an active project, with regular updates and version releases?
“Move and Improve” lets you upgrade the components of your application infrastructure to the latest versions, such as migrating WebLogic to version 12.2 and Oracle database to version 19c, and uses an Oracle validated architecture that can be deployed from Terraform scripts. This implements the best practices for running applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This approach makes it easy to spin up/down instances of the applications for dev and test work and improves the quality of production releases.
Do you want to implement a cloud native architecture, with support for elastic scaling, continuous deployment, and self-healing?
This enables the deployment of WebLogic based applications on Kubernetes clusters of Docker containers. Using OKE, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s managed Kubernetes service, it is easy to build highly resilient, scalable infrastructure, while levering your existing application code. This infrastructure is ideal to modern devops approaches to software development.
Across each of these approaches, Oracle offers choices to use database-as-a-service options for your applications, while preserving your investment in perpetual database licenses through its “Bring-Your-Own-License” (BYOL) program.
| Current status | Goal | Type | Target Validated Architecture |
|---|---|---|---|
| Any custom application running on any Oracle database. | Improve reliability, performance, and security. Lower TCO. Minimize migration risk. | "Lift and Shift" | Move the application stack to a BM or VM on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Migrate database to Oracle Database Cloud Service (BYOL). |
| JavaEE/WebLogic applications running on any Oracle database. | As “Lift and Shift,” plus: upgrade to latest WLS, automate dev/test/production deployments, implement HA and DR, consolidate databases. | “Move and Improve” | Deploy JavaEE/WLS to VMs/BMs by using Terraform scripts. Migrate databases to Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Database Cloud Service (VM or BM) or Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service. Implement advanced HA and DR options. |
| JavaEE/WebLogic applications running on any Oracle database. | As “Move and Improve,” plus: increase flexibility, elasticity, and improve developer productivity with extensive automation options. | “Modernization” | Deploy JavaEE/WLS to Docker/Kubernetes clusters, by using Terraform scripts. Migrate databases to ADB, Oracle Database Cloud Service (VM or BM) or Oracle Database Exadata Cloud Service. Implement advanced HA and DR options. |
Oracle can help you understand the considerations to choose the scenario that best fits your requirements and provides validated architectures to implement these scenarios.
Database Migrations
Whether you are using versions 11g, 12c, or 18c of Oracle Database on-premises, you can improve the quality of your applications by upgrading to any of the managed Oracle Database Cloud Services on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
With these services you reduce the work involved in database maintenance, increase performance and availability, while reducing the overall cost of ownership.
Validated Solutions that Address your Business Requirements
Because Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was built for exactly the type of usage pattern found in custom applications with Oracle databases, existing deployments can be easily moved and improved with little or no modification to the environment or to your business processes.
This Validated Solution Guide will provide you with reference architectures to help design the best migration path for your applications, and to understand how to implement best practices for managing them on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. We’ll cover:
- Matching the design of your on-premises network model
- Establishing secure and high-performance connectivity from on-premises to your cloud applications
- Designing for resilience and high-availability
- Recovering from outages with integrated disaster recovery options
- Deploying a secure architecture, with isolation of resources and encryption of all data
- Integrating with your existing identity management system
- Maintaining control and visibility over cloud resource utilization and costs
- Migrating your application and database environments into the cloud