Announcing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Quick Start

I am so very excited to announce the launch of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Quick Start program.

A Quick Start enables anyone to deploy complex software stacks from our partners and the community on our Generation 2 cloud infrastructure. It automatically deploys compute, storage and networking and automates installation. These examples are intended to get users going quickly on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. They can be customized to form the basis of more complex deployments.

The 22 initial Quick Start examples are available on GitHub. They are a collection of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) examples, specifically Terraform, and walkthroughs that allow our customers to get started using partner products on both Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Kubernetes Engine (our Kubernetes managed service) easily. Our 17 launch partners for the Quick Start are:

A number of very talented people worked on this. Looking at the timestamps 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. Some of those I’ve had the great pleasure of working with include 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. I look forward to working with these people, and the entire community, for years to come in a variety of capacities.

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 our community work as well. I hear he has a solid book on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure coming out shortly…

Each project gets its own repo. This is important because 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.

On other clouds, the Quick Start program is distinct from the marketplace. At Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, we’re viewing Quick Start as an incubator. We’re planning to recruit ISVs and partner with them to build Terraform integrations in Quick Start that deploy their products on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. With that work in place, we plan to use that same Terraform as the basis for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Marketplace offers. That makes it easier for customers to adopt partner solutions on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. 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, which benefits our customers, partners, and core business. You should see more on that in the next few weeks.