Bit-by-bit: Why Vodafone is using Oracle's Dedicated Region

Vodafone is using a public cloud region in its own datacentre to take complex workloads online

Oracle’s Dedicated Region does what it says on the tin: unlocks a public cloud region for only a single customer.

"It's like a public region of OCI running into our datacentre," said Vodafone's group IT operations director Pedro Sardo when we spoke to him at Oracle CloudWorld Tour London last week.

Joining Vodafone as UK CIO in 2015, Sardo now runs all of the company's IT operations and datacentres across Europe, as well as its technology centres in India, Egypt and Romania.

"We work as an internal systems integrator to support Vodafone's strategy of insourcing and creating our own capabilities, to basically do anything related to IT."

The strategy is paying off. Pardo's description of IT operations as "a pretty good-size systems integrator" slightly undersells the scale of the work: there are about 13,000 people in the technology centres, providing services exclusively to Vodafone.

The discussions about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) began about two years ago, growing out of Vodafone and Oracle's existing long-standing relationship. Vodafone was looking to modernise its applications, especially its older stack.

"Whenever we build a new application it is very easy to build it on cloud native; but if you have an application that sometimes we have been running for many, many years, that are really critical to our business, it is not that easy to modernise them. That's why we were looking for alternatives."

Fast-forward 12 months and Vodafone signed a contract for OCI Dedicated Region.

"It gives us the benefits of public cloud - all the scalability, the automation, the automated services, and the things you don't need to worry about because that's managed by the public cloud provider - in our datacentre."

"Basically, it gives us options for how you migrate into public cloud

One of the biggest draws was the ability to move workloads to the cloud component-by-component. Normally when moving to the public cloud, every layer - web server, application, database - has to move together; but because everything was already running in Vodafone's datacentre the team could move different layers when it worked for them.

"I might move the database first, then I might move the application layer next. Applications that are tightly integrated, I don't need to move them at the same time; I might move one, then the other. So basically, it gives us options for how you migrate into public cloud."

The reasons for working this way, rather than migrating all at once, might be complexity, or regulatory; some applications are just safer running on your own infrastructure.

Much of the focus now is on the database layer - Sardo's team has already moved 150 databases to OCI Dedicated Region, from all across Europe - but the work is soon set to expand to "some of the most complex applications that we have," either due to their scale or the complexity of the processes that run across them.

For the next 18 months - at least - this project will dominate much of the team's time. They are migrating "several thousand" databases and applications to Dedicated Region, as well as making OCI work in other areas of the business.

Sardo says, "Our relationship with Oracle is broader than just OCI. We use a lot of their applications, a lot of their products - this is one of our key partners. We have others, but Oracle is certainly part of our close partner ecosystem."