I mean, for Oracle Enterprise Manager, I saw the end coming now Oracle is aggressively pushing Oracle Management Cloud. But although I noticed the new Cloud service offering early on, being interested in all things performance, even I was surprised by the follow up of Oracle Management Cloud additions. Besides “IT Analytics”, “Log Analytics” and “Application Performance Monitoring”, Oracle added completely new, within a year (!) cloud services called: “Orchestration“, Compliance” and “Security Monitoring and Analytics“. What I noticed and took hold in my mind, is that Mr Ellison referred to the Oracle Management Cloud Cloud offerings as “…it will replace a lot of tools…”. One Oracle tool that immediately pops up in my mind is the Oracle Enterprise Manager framework when this remark was made during the Sunday evening keynote before Oracle Open World. In my mind, Oracle is striving for a “cloud only” software provider and…it makes sense being Oracle, I think.
From an Oracle perspective this makes sense. I would opt for cloud only products and services and I saw several presentations hinting it (more and more) over the years. Cloud first – on-premise later. The Exadata Express Cloud service is the first of a lot of those business driven “Cloud only” phenomena. Years ago while setting up a private cloud for a customer based on Oracle VM, OEM and database lifecycle pack options, I wondered if it would still make sense to spend a lot of time, in the future to come, on “simple things like” deploying a RAC node environment. I did it via “a click” using the database lifecycle management pack functionality. It took less than an hour to push a multinode RAC environment, based on Oracle’s best practises packages in the provided golden image template, to go from nothing to a fully deployed and configured production ready environment.
Now you can do the same in the Oracle Cloud with almost no prior high-tech knowledge needed, if needed even with an additional Data guard environment attached…
What in the last decades was advertised as the “database administration not needed – DBA killers”, XML or Oracle Enterprise Manager or “You need to become a DBA 2.0” slogan’s never really became through… The Cloud now actually will force, IMHO, the old school classical database administrator (backup/recovery/configuration/setup…) to evolve in something else. The Cloud offerings will make a definite impact. The “database administrator” profession that I learned 20+ years ago is coming to its end. Most people I know already realised this already and chanced gears into some “data topic specialist” alike. In a time were it is possible to, with a creditcard in your hand and filling some deployment details in a webpage, do the whole “backup/recovery/configuration/setup…” with no special skills needed, the only “database administration” jobs left will be where the data is - working for Oracle, Oracle Cloud service providers, in datacenters with database (managed service) offerings.
Although I can see that there will be (hopefully quick solutions) for missing pieces like proven “AWR/ASH/ADDM, etc performance tooling in the Cloud”, I am worried how high the obstacles will become to even learn stuff like “create a database”, “how does it work”, “building / testing the latest options” if everything (might) will disappear behind a door that can only be opened using a considerable money amount (175$/month for, for example, the Exadata Express Cloud offering) in the Cloud. Hopefully Oracle will find a solution for this. In my mind set at least the Oracle Enterprise Manager has seen its days. The database administrator “old school” will evolve in “security specialist”, “Devops”, “the database architecture guy”, etc. The future is changing, changing fast…
Lets see what the future holds and adapt/improve/evolve…
HTH/M
I agree on both counts. If they get the Management Cloud right, and it does look good, it will start making less and less sense to manage Cloud Control yourself.
I know a bunch of DBAs will read this and say, “No way! DBAs will be needed forever!”, but I think the type of DBAs we had 20 years ago are already long gone. The role is definitely more architectural now than it was and I see that getting more so.
Cheers
Tim…