OCI is focusing on making the cloud more accessible to businesses with streamlined processes and enhanced flexibility.
Oracle recently announced it is expanding its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) platform, with no less than 11 new compute, networking and storage services, and capabilities. These new additions are aimed at enabling customers to run workloads faster, more securely and for less cost.
OCI Aims to Make the Cloud Easier for Businesses
The new features may make it easier for potential clients who are reluctant to take full advantage of the cloud. OCI claims that a common misunderstanding of the cloud is that customers fear they must rebuild their existing applications—and will have to deal with overly complicated pricing models once they’re set up. The company added that another recurring concern is the belief that customers will need to use a suite of different technologies to fully scale their operations.
Simulation company Altair’s Senior Vice President of Strategic Relations, Piush Patel, talks about Oracle Cloud.
Despite this, cloud adoption continues to expand across the globe as businesses transform their models and increase demand for secure remote technology. With these enhancements, OCI aims to provide its customers with increased flexibility and simplicity as they scale up in the cloud without having to rewrite their applications.
“OCI continues to break the rules in the cloud, helping customers run their workloads faster, more securely and more economically,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Customers can build cloud-native apps on OCI with support for open, standards-based Kubernetes while AI and high-performance computing customers can build some of the fastest computing clusters in the cloud.”
OCI’s 11 New Features—And What They Do
Let’s take a closer look at the new features Oracle has added.
OCI Compute enables customers to provide and manage compute hosts, known as instances, which are deployable on bare metal and virtual machines (VMs) alike. OCI Compute enables scaling within a compute instance as well as scaling by adding more instances. This allows customers flexibility without the need to re-write their applications—and it reduces risks and costs when migrating to the cloud.
New services under OCI Compute include:
- Container Instances, which enable customers to use containers without having to directly manage the hosting VM or require Kubernetes orchestration. Instead, OCI takes on the creation of the instance with a secure OS image, networking and storage. Previously, customers had to set up a Kubernetes environment to work with OCI containers.
- AMD E4.Dense Compute Instances, which enable customer workflows in instances powered by attached Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) drives that feature low-latency storage. Workloads that could benefit from these low-latency storage technologies include relational and NoSQL databases, virtualized direct-attached storage, caching and data warehousing.
- Oracle Cloud VMware Solution on AMD, which gives customers access to new AMD-based 32, 64 and 128 core options, provides them with expanded VM deployment density options per software-defined data center host. This could be quite useful for high CPU or high memory-use cases. OCI claims this solution can deliver over 2.5 times the memory and CPUs per host than its competitors.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN) Interconnect to establish direct peering connections with some third-party CDN providers. This would offer no-cost outbound bandwidth to Oracle’s Object Storage platform. It could reduce origin-to-CDN costs. For now, this service is available in North America for Cloudflare CDN users.
- CDN Service is Oracle’s own native CDN. It enables customers to use geographically distributed networks to deliver digital content to nearby end-users. The feature includes integrated APIs, console, UCM billing and strengthened integration between OCI Object Storage, Compute and CDN. Overall, this service aims to reduce origin-server-to-CDN egress fees.
- Flexible Web Application Firewall (WAF) is a service that lets customers define a single firewall policy to protect applications from common exploits. In addition, customers can apply the policy to their load balancer as well as push it out to the edge, making it particularly useful for hybrid environments.
- Web Application Acceleration (WAA) will allow users to cache and compress web HTTP responses in their load balancer.
- Network Visualizer, as the name suggests, will enable users to visualize their network paths, including the virtual network entities in the paths, as well as perform a configuration-based connectivity check. This tool aims to help identify and resolve common virtual network configuration issues.
- vTAP enhances troubleshooting, security analysis and data monitoring by enabling network packet capture and inspection without disrupting the network’s performance.
- The updates to OCI Storage include Flexible Block Volumes with Performance-based Auto-tuning. This function allows customers to adjust performance characteristics of block storage volumes automatically in response to fluctuations in demand, helping customers manage peak demand.
- The last of Oracle’s updates is High Availability ZFS, which packages the ZFS file server into an automated deployment stack that relies on OCI Block Volumes for underlying raw storage.
The majority of OCI’s new offerings fall under OCI Networking, which helps customers connect securely to Oracle’s virtual cloud network (VCN) to create isolated, secure environments for their workload. OCI has taken steps to streamline its networking capabilities to allow it to handle global-scale networking workloads at reduced costs. Continuing from the previous three new features, those that fall under OCI Networking include:
The rest of Oracle’s updates fall under OCI Storage, which gives customers high-performance and low-cost cloud storage options by way of object, file, block and archive storage. A single type of block volume can serve various workload types regardless of cost or performance and can be reconfigured on the fly without disrupting the workload—resulting in a flexible service that can serve high-level agreement applications at significantly reduced prices compared to Oracle’s competitors.
Oracle Positions Itself as an Alternative to Hyperscalers
OCI has grown aggressively to compete with the big hyperscaler businesses, which are companies that provide cloud, networking and internet services at scale with an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model—think of Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. OCI maintains that its experience with on-premises database capabilities makes its product stronger than its hyperscaler competitors. And engineering heavy hitters are taking notice.
“OCI has enabled us to increase the number of Monte Carlo simulations we are able to run by 25 percent,” said Ian Brunton, application development group leader, Oracle Red Bull Racing. “By leveraging a modern technology stack utilizing the power and flexibility of Kubernetes, we can scale up our simulation platform while keeping costs within the tight spending regulations defined by the sport.”
By enhancing OCI’s flexibility and making it more streamlined, Oracle intends to make it easier for companies that may be considering moving to the cloud but have concerns about cost and performance to take that step into the cloud—and to rely on Oracle to help them do so.
“The promise of the cloud has always been paying for only what you need, but customers continue to over-provision due to rigid configuration options in most cloud platforms,” said Dave McCarthy, research vice president, Cloud and Edge Infrastructure Services, IDC. “OCI has made significant strides to address this problem by introducing new flexible compute, storage and network infrastructure services over the last year. OCI customers can reduce costs by more accurately matching consumption to demand.”
Oracle intends to roll out these new capabilities in 2022.
Read more about Oracle’s innovations in cloud technology at Oracle’s Ongoing Bid to Grow Its Public Sector Cloud Presence.