Dive Brief:

• Oracle launched an autonomous cloud database capable of patching cybersecurity weaknesses on its own accord, according to an announcement by CTO and Chairman Larry Ellison at Oracle OpenWorld 2017. Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud uses machine learning to eliminate human maintenance and error, offering self-driving, self-scaling and self-repairing database functions.

• The company claims performance 10 times faster than and half the cost of Amazon's RedShift system. The autonomous cloud service offers customer simpler service and instant elasticity, according to the announcement.

• The database comes with a 99.995% availability guarantee, and Ellison said, "This is the most important thing we've done in a long, long time." It will be available for data warehouse workloads before 2018.

Dive Insight:

Oracle may set its cloud up as an alternative to Amazon, but the company still has competition from Microsoft, Google, IBM and Alibaba to handle.

Oracle's autonomous cloud is a concerted push to enhance customer loyalty and attract customers away from competitors. The autonomous cloud database is the first of its kind, and it is yet unclear if other providers will release their own. 

Fears of automation are often associated with workers on a factory room floor, but Oracle's announcement demonstrates automation may go far deeper into the enterprise in coming years. QA and testing currently suffer from a lack automation, and developments like this will be key to streamlining evaluation and fixes of software.

The news may be cause for concern for DevOps or testing IT workers, but studies have shown AI and automation are more likely to improve worker productivity and create new tech jobs.