Antifragile Infrastructure: Must-Ask Questions to Scale Without Surprises

Making the decision to scale your startup can be exhilarating. You can hire a bigger team, make improvements to your product, and — most importantly — help people on a larger scale. It’s amazing! Yet without a careful strategy and the right tools, your company can flounder when attempting to grow.

This is one of the biggest reasons why Oracle and Microsoft recently made an announcement that surprised many: we have partnered to interconnect ourrespective clouds and makeit easier for customers to run workloads and applications.We believe that the future is all about multi-cloud, and want to make it as easy as possible for our customers to transition into that type of workflow.

Right now, organizations that implement multi-cloud strategies run workloads and applications across different cloud providers. This prevents vendor lock-in and makes integration and data exchange difficult. Thankfully, that is exactly what the Oracle-Microsoft partnership solves for.

You are probably thinking right now, hold up, this is about big enterprise companies. Why should my ten-person startup care?

It’s about future-proofing your startup. If your startup is scaling or readying to scale (which is almost everyone), multi-cloud will be your strategy, too.

Jenny Griffiths, the CEO and founder of UK-based Snap Tech, found that it was possible to save 40% in hosting costs alone by switching to Oracle-based infrastructure. “We moved our hosting to Oracle Cloud using managed Kubernetes,” Griffiths said. “We’re delivering technology that we never could have dreamed of… Oracle is instrumental in helping us scale and innovate.”

But back to the announcement for a moment. Why did these formerly intense competitors decide to shake hands and do business? Customers are beginning to demand technology with multi-cloud capabilities. It’s about flexibility, ubiquity and freedom. I believe this demand will only increase and become the standard.

The partnership connects both companies’ data centers so mutual customers can more easily use cloud services from both firms, which allows clients to connect critical systems built by different vendors.

This crossover makes business easier for everyone — no vendor lock-in — giving best-of-breed flexibility, performance and cost savings in the long run.

Why Startups Should Care

Future-proofing your startup is important — yes, especially at the early stage.

In the early days of your firm, you are primarily concerned with a couple of things — get the product up and running, and make sure those early customers are having a great experience. That was my experience as founder, and that should be the focus. Anything beyond that can seem like a distraction. The challenge comes when it’s time to scale in a hurry. More specifically, CTO’s will run into the problem when they land that really big customer or lots and lots of customers.

Suddenly, the design they made for their beta customer doesn’t scale well. You find yourself throwing more compute resources at and get locked into an infrastructure that is no longer fiscally reasonable and difficult to migrate away from easily. You can look at discount plans, but that requires upfront cash and sizing you don’t really need right now. The on-demand model is awesome, but can be costly, and increasingly difficult to move away from the more products you leverage.

Multi-Cloud in theWild

So, what can you do now to reduce the risk of scale while maintaining the agility you enjoy today? Spend the time to model, plan and take action. And ask yourself and your team these tough but critical questions:

1) Scale Ability:What happens if you suddenly need to scale up? What does autoscaling do to your monthly bill? Can your budget handle a sudden spike in compute, storage or other services?

2) Geographic Scale:What happens if your demand needs to scale in different regions? What does that do to your bill? How much will your high availability strategy increase your bill? For some vendors (not Oracle) pricing can vary significantly by the region you have your workloads running.

3) Avoiding Lock-in:Does going up your vendor stack lock you in? If so, how difficult is it to move?

4) Managing Outages:How will you manage large outages because of mistakes your vendor makes? Can you easily reroute to another solution?

5) Integration Ease:Do your customers run applications that you need to integrate? How will the platform you are running impact the integration, performance and business partnership?

If you do not have clarity on these questions (and there are many more, no doubt), or the answers make your CFO or DevOps lead nervous, now is the time to take action. A multicloud strategy can future-proof your startup and avoid many of the issues listed above.

Back to the partnership example, Oracle databases, including Autonomous, can ensure your startup can scale. And accessing Oracle databases connected to Azure is a core reason how businesses use the cross-connect, allowing customers a one-stop shop for the cloud services they need to run their entire business.

Why Oracle is for Startups

I’m an entrepreneur that also has experience at large corporations. That experience helps running the Oracle for Startups program because I get to sit at the intersection of some pretty incredible innovations between emerging startups and big enterprise companies. We believe the startup-enterprise relationship is critical to driving future innovations.

Companies within Oracle’s startup program get free credits and 70% off the platform, which allows them to reinvest those savings and accelerate their growth. This underscores our program’s prioritization of customers and innovation over profit. Cash is king at a startup and being able to get enterprise-level discount in a pay-as-you-go model is a huge benefit.

Kinetica, a fast-growing active analytics platform for enterprises, realizes the power of multi-cloud and Oracle’s unique abilities: “Oracle has world-class GPU instances that deliver power, performance and scalability at a lower cost,” said Paul Appleby, CEO of Kinetica. “We see tremendous value for customers running Kinetica on Oracle Cloud.”

No matter what, Oracle for Startups is dedicated to helping startups get to the next level of their business.

“The partnership with Oracle has been game-changing for us. It gives us access to enterprise-grade technology as well as customers and marketing,” Peter Lilley, the cofounder of iGeolise, said. “All we have to do is concentrate on growing our business.”

Interested in enterprise scale, value-priced cloud, multi-cloud strategies, and access to customers around the world? Check out Oracle for Startups to learn more.