Why One Customer Chose PostgreSQL on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Still Saved on Oracle Costs

Why One Customer Chose PostgreSQL on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Still Saved on Oracle Costs

Aug 7, 2025 | Open Source Software, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

A few days ago, I had a really insightful conversation with a colleague, who shared a customer story that perfectly captured something seen more and more across different industries: organizations looking to modernize, reduce complexity, and take control of their database strategy without being locked into one model or one engine.

The story revolved around a customer who decided to move away from their on-premises Oracle databases. At first, it might sound like the classic “cloud migration” narrative everyone has heard before, but this one is different. They weren’t switching cloud providers, and they weren’t turning their back on Oracle either. In fact, they stayed with Oracle. Just in a different way.

They migrated a significant portion of their Oracle workloads to PostgreSQL, but they ran that PostgreSQL on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). And even more interesting: they took advantage of Oracle Support Rewards to reduce their overall cloud spend by leveraging the Oracle support contracts they were already paying for on-premises.

It’s one of those use cases that highlights how important flexibility has become in modern enterprise IT. Customers want to modernize, but they also want the freedom to choose the right tools for each workload. With OCI continuing to evolve and expand, Oracle has positioned itself to support both traditional enterprise use cases and modern, open-source-first strategies.

This particular customer story is a strong example of that. Moving from on-prem Oracle database to PostgreSQL, but doing it in a way that continues to benefit from Oracle’s infrastructure, incentives, and long-term roadmap.

A Familiar Starting Point

The customer, a mid-sized company in the DACH region, was running several Oracle database instances on physical hardware in their own data center. The environment was stable, but due to ongoing sovereignty discussions in the market and in order to meet their CIO’s strategic directive to adopt more open-source technologies, the customer decided to move a subset of their Oracle databases to PostgreSQL.

This wasn’t about a full migration or a complete cloud exit. The approach was pragmatic. Only the databases that were suitable for PostgreSQL and could be decoupled from on-prem dependencies were selected for migration. Other Oracle workloads either remained on-premises or weren’t ideal candidates to move at this time. But the customer is also evaluating Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer as a way to maintain a consistent cloud operating model while keeping certain workloads close to home.

What stood out was that the team didn’t move these PostgreSQL workloads to another cloud provider. They chose to run them on OCI, which allowed them to benefit from modern open-source technologies while remaining inside Oracle’s ecosystem.

PostgreSQL on OCI

PostgreSQL continues to grow in popularity among developers and architects, especially in cloud-native environments. Oracle recognized this demand and responded with OCI Database with PostgreSQL, a fully managed, enterprise-grade PostgreSQL service designed to meet the needs of both modern application development and mission-critical workloads.

In this case, the customer saw OCI PostgreSQL as a natural extension of their existing cloud investments. They were already using OCI for other workloads and appreciated the operational consistency across services. Running PostgreSQL within OCI meant they avoided the complexity and overhead of introducing another cloud provider, ensuring centralized governance, billing, and support across both Oracle and PostgreSQL workloads.

The service itself offers built-in high availability, automated backups, patching, monitoring, and tight integration with OCI’s broader security and identity services. These features gave the customer the reliability they needed without the overhead of managing infrastructure themselves.

Oracle Support Rewards – A Hidden Advantage

One of the most compelling parts of this story wasn’t just technical. It was financial.

Despite moving certain workloads away from Oracle database, the customer continued to benefit from Oracle’s ecosystem through the Oracle Support Rewards (OSR) program. This initiative allows organizations with existing Oracle on-premises support contracts to earn rewards when consuming OCI services.

With Oracle Support Rewards, you can earn rewards when using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services, and those rewards can be applied to pay for support contracts that customers have for other eligible on-premises Oracle products.

For example, a customer can be both an OCI customer, and have an on-premises Oracle database enterprise license that they invoice for monthly. The customer’s OCI usage allows them to earn rewards that they can apply to pay the Oracle database enterprise support contract invoice. These invoices are paid in a separate Billing Center system outside of OCI. As a result, Oracle Support Rewards can help lower your support bill.

Get more value out of OCI with Oracle Support Rewards. It’s simple. For every dollar spent on OCI, you can accrue $0.25 in Oracle Support Rewards. If you’re an unlimited license agreement (ULA) customer, you can accrue $0.33 for every dollar spent.

That’s right: even though the workloads had moved to open-source PostgreSQL, the customer still used Oracle’s infrastructure and Oracle rewarded them for it.

The Bigger Picture

This migration wasn’t about replacing Oracle. It was about evolving the database landscape while staying on a trusted platform.

For the PostgreSQL use cases, the customer chose to modernize and go cloud-native. But for mission-critical Oracle workloads that require high performance and data residency, they are actively considering Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer. This would allow them to extend OCI’s cloud operating model into their own data center – delivering the same automation, APIs, and support model as OCI, without compromising on location or control.

This hybrid approach ensures operational consistency across environments while supporting both open-source and enterprise-grade workloads.

OCI provided the customer with the flexibility to adopt open-source technologies, modernize legacy systems, and still benefit from Oracle’s performance, security, and enterprise infrastructure. And with OSR, Oracle helped reduce the cost of that transformation even when it involved PostgreSQL.

Final Thoughts

This use case was a great reminder of how cloud strategy isn’t always black and white. Sometimes the right answer isn’t “migrate everything to X”. It’s about giving customers choices while offering incentives that make those choices easier.

In this case, the customer successfully modernized part of their database environment, adopted open-source technology, and avoided a complex multi-cloud scenario, all while staying within Oracle’s ecosystem and leveraging its financial and operational benefits.

For any organization thinking about PostgreSQL, data sovereignty, or maintaining architectural flexibility with tools like Exadata Cloud@Customer, this is a story worth looking at more closely.

Open Source in the Cloud Era – Still Free, but Never Cheap?

Open Source in the Cloud Era – Still Free, but Never Cheap?

Jul 25, 2025 | Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Open Source Software, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

This article continues the conversation started in “Open source can help with portability and lock-in – but it is not a silver bullet”, where we explored how open source technologies can reduce cloud lock-in, but aren’t a universal fix. Now we go one step further.

Open source software (OSS) is the unsung hero behind much of the innovation we see in the cloud today. From container runtimes powering serverless workloads to the databases running mission-critical apps, OSS is everywhere. But now the question arises: how do we make open source sustainable and what role do the cloud providers play?

Some say the hyperscalers are the villains in this story. I see it differently.

I believe the major cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) are not undermining open source. On the contrary, they are expanding its reach, accelerating its maturity, and making it more accessible than ever before.

Open Source Is The Backbone of the Cloud

The most exciting thing about cloud platforms today is how accessible open source technology has become. Technologies like Kubernetes, Prometheus, MySQL, Redis, and Postgres are no longer just community-maintained stacks. They are global services delivered with enterprise reliability. What hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure, and Oracle Cloud have done is operationalize these tools at scale, offering managed services that developers trust, without caring for patching, HA or backups. The result is remarkable: global systems running OSS as a service.

In other words, turning OSS into mainstream infrastructure. That is not to be understated.

Running Open Source at Scale Is Hard (And Expensive)

Yes, open source is free to use. But it’s not free to run.

Anyone can deploy an open source application. Running it at scale, though? That’s a different story. It takes discipline, expertise, and relentless operational focus:

  • high availability setups,
  • automatic failover,
  • performance tuning,
  • deep telemetry,
  • continuous patching,
  • secure configurations,
  • IAM integration,
  • versioning strategy,
  • backup orchestration,
  • and regular upgrades.

They are day-to-day realities for teams operating at scale.

That’s why managed services from hyperscalers exist and why they are so widely adopted. Platforms like Amazon RDS, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Google Cloud Memorystore, or Oracle MySQL HeatWave take the core of a powerful open source engine and remove the heavy lifting. You are not just getting hosted software, you are getting resilience, automation, and accountability.

When you consume Google’s GKE or Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE), you are effectively outsourcing operations. You gain predictability and uptime without building a 24/7 SRE team. That’s not lock-in. It’s operational leverage!

Hyperscalers aren’t restricting choice. They are offering a second path. One designed for teams that need focus, speed, and as little downtime as possible.

A Fair Critique – OSS Creators Left Behind?

Of course, there’s another side to this story. One that deserves attention.

Some open source creators and maintainers feel left behind in this cloud-powered success story. Their argument is simple: hyperscalers are monetizing open source projects at massive scale, often without contributing back in proportion – either in engineering resources, funding, or visibility.

And they have a point. Popular tools like MongoDB, Redis, and Elasticsearch were widely adopted, then productized by cloud platforms without formal partnerships. As a response, these projects changed their licenses to restrict commercial use by cloud providers. That, in turn, led to forks like OpenSearch (from Elasticsearch), Valkey (from Redis), or OpenTofu (from Terraform).

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But this isn’t really a cloud problem, it’s an economic problem.

Open source used to be a side project or a contribution model. Today, it powers mission-critical infrastructure. That shift from volunteer-based innovation to always-on enterprise backbone created a funding gap. It’s no longer enough to push code to GitHub and wait for donations. Projects need full-time maintainers, security audits, documentation, roadmap planning, and long-term governance. That requires sustainable business models.

Cloud providers, on the other hand, rely on open source for customer value and velocity. Innovation doesn’t just come from inside hyperscaler walls, it flows in from the OSS community as well. The relationship is symbiotic. And it must evolve.

Yes, cloud vendors benefit from open ecosystems. But many are starting to give back – through engineering contributions, visibility programs, upstream engagement, and community funding. Oracle, for example, contributes to OpenJDK, GraalVM, and Helidon, and backs Linux Foundation efforts. Microsoft sponsors maintainers through GitHub Sponsors and supports dozens of OSS projects. Even AWS, who was long seen as an outsider, is now actively involved in maintaining forks like OpenSearch.

The path forward isn’t about choosing sides. It’s about redefining the balance: between freedom and funding, between platform and project. OSS maintainers need economic models that work. Hyperscalers need the trust and innovation open source brings. Everyone benefits when the relationship is healthy. Right?

Cloud and Open Source – Not a Rivalry, But a Partnership

The old “cloud versus open source” debate is no longer useful, because it no longer reflects reality.

We are not watching a rivalry unfold. We are witnessing mutual acceleration. Open source is the engine that drives much of today’s cloud innovation. And cloud platforms are the distribution channels that scale it to the world. One without the other? Still powerful, but far less impactful.

Today’s enterprise IT landscape is built on this pairing. We have Kubernetes running on managed clusters. It’s open telemetry pipelines feeding cloud-native observability. Then there is Linux, Postgres, Redis, and Java. All delivered as secure, scalable, managed services.

As you can see, behind the scenes, hyperscalers are contributing more than compute. They are actively investing in the open source ecosystem. And these aren’t isolated contributions, they signal a larger trend: cloud and OSS are no longer separate spheres. They are interdependent, each shaping the roadmap of the other.

And the real winners? Customers.

Enterprises benefit when innovation from open communities meets the scale, automation, and security of cloud platforms. You get the openness you want, and the reliability you need. You gain velocity without sacrificing visibility. You build on open standards while delivering business outcomes.

When cloud providers and OSS communities collaborate (and not compete), modern IT gets better for everyone.

Sustainable Collaboration

So, where does this go from here?

We are entering a phase where co-evolution between open source and cloud platforms becomes the norm. Sustainability is no longer just a community conversation. It’s becoming a core pillar of enterprise architecture and vendor strategy.

We will likely see a continued rise in permissive-but-protective licenses with models like Polyform, BSL, or even custom usage clauses that allow free adoption but limit monetization without contribution. These licenses won’t solve every conflict, but they are a step toward fairness by keeping projects open while preserving the creator’s ability to fund long-term development.

On the cloud provider side, we will see more intentional programs designed to give back. That could mean upstream engineering contributions, visibility via marketplace integration, or funding through sponsorships,

Meanwhile, OSS vendors and maintainers are moving beyond “just licenses” toward hybrid monetization. Some go SaaS-first. Some offer premium support or managed versions of their tools. We will also likely see more partnerships between OSS projects and cloud platforms, where integration, co-marketing, and joint roadmaps replace conflict with alignment.

And the payoff?

Enterprises will benefit the most. They will be able to build with the freedom and transparency of open source, while still consuming services with the resilience, automation, and support that modern business demands. No one wants to reinvent patching pipelines, build observability stacks from scratch, or manage HA for distributed databases. Managed services let teams focus on value, not plumbing.

The future isn’t about choosing between “cloud” or “open”, it’s about building systems that are both open and operable, both innovative and sustainable.

Because that’s the direction modern IT is already moving. Whether we plan for it or not.

Final Thoughts

Cloud platforms took tools from hobby projects and universities and turned them into the foundation of global infrastructure. That’s something worth acknowledging, even celebrating!

Of course, the discussion isn’t over. Sustainability matters. Transparency matters. But painting cloud providers as the problem risks missing the bigger opportunity.

Let us focus on building systems that are both open and operable. Let’s support OSS maintainers, not just in code, but in business. And let’s keep the conversation moving – not from a place of blame, but from a vision of shared success.