For years, the conversation around PeopleSoft in the cloud has been singularly focused: OCI or bust. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is marketed as the "natural home" for PeopleSoft, and with good reason; it offers tight integration, access to the latest database innovations, and bundled pricing for Oracle customers. Add on PeopleSoft Cloud Manager, and you have a natural fit.
But what if OCI isn't on the table, but cloud is?
What if your cloud strategy points to Azure, AWS, or GCP instead? What if organizational policy, procurement preferences, or existing cloud infrastructure dictate a different path? Does that mean your PeopleSoft modernization efforts are doomed?
Absolutely not.
The Danger of a One-Cloud Mentality
We've allowed the narrative to drift into dangerous territory. We often treat PeopleSoft as an OCI-only solution. That's short-sighted. PeopleSoft is not a monolith chained to a single hyperscaler. It's a robust, modular enterprise platform with decades of refinement, and it can run and run well on any major cloud provider.
Sure, OCI might be the "easiest" option on paper, especially with Cloud Manager and lift-and-shift templates. But defaulting to ease over strategy is a trap. Cloud adoption should align with organizational priorities, not vendor incentives. And that means asking more challenging questions about architecture, automation, cost modeling, security, and long-term maintainability. Questions that don't have a single correct answer.
PeopleSoft as a Platform, Not Just a Product
When you decouple PeopleSoft from OCI, something powerful happens: you stop thinking like an app admin and start thinking like a platform engineer.
Now you're asking:
How do we automate the provisioning of app servers and process schedulers in Azure using Terraform?
Can we containerize the web tier and deploy it to GKE or EKS?
What does our observability stack look like without Oracle Management Cloud?
How can we use Chef or Ansible to manage patching across hundreds of VMs?
Suddenly, PeopleSoft becomes composable—a set of components that you can architect, scale, and automate with modern tools. That's a massive mental shift, and it opens doors that OCI-only thinking can close.
Reality Check: It's Already Happening
Plenty of organizations are running PeopleSoft successfully on non-OCI clouds today. Some use GCP for network optimization, others lean into AWS for its mature DevOps toolchain. Azure-native shops integrate PeopleSoft into their broader Active Directory and Microsoft 365 ecosystems.
In these scenarios, what matters isn't where PeopleSoft is hosted. What's important is how it's engineered. Infrastructure-as-Code, Git-driven config, monitoring through OpenTelemetry, automated refresh pipelines, immutable image builds—these are the practices that matter. The cloud provider is just the canvas.
A Call to PeopleSoft Teams: Get Cloud-Ready Everywhere
If you're supporting PeopleSoft today, your job is not to become an OCI expert. Your job is to make PeopleSoft cloud-native, regardless of the platform.
That means:
Mastering Terraform and Chef to replace click-heavy provisioning.
Understanding containerization and orchestration, even if you're not fully there yet.
Building out logging and telemetry pipelines that don't rely on a single vendor stack.
Thinking in pipelines, not tickets. In Git repos, not shared drives.
And most of all: staying open to the reality that great PeopleSoft deployments can (and do) happen outside of OCI.
Final Thought
PeopleSoft has always been flexible. It's run on mainframes, bare metal, VMs, private clouds, and now public clouds. Don't let a single vendor's narrative limit your vision. OCI might be a great option, but it should never be the only one.
This blog exists to explore what PeopleSoft in the cloud looks like when you call the shots.
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