Oracle launches 11 services on its OCI public cloud

If Oracle’s cloud offer is often highlighted on the application and analytical part, the supplier also continues to strengthen the infrastructure services of its OCI public cloud. The latter is accessible on 37 cloud regions worldwide which will be increased to 44 by the end of the year and more and more customers are using it for workloads other than applications, said this week. Leo Leung, Vice President, Product Manager for OCI, announcing 11 additional services across compute, storage and networking. Customers include GoTo, which manages GoTo Meeting video streams on OCI’s Kubernetes service, SoundHound, which uses AI and handles 100 million requests every month, and the global racing circuit Sail GP. to analyze sailboat data. The latter operates at 30,000 data points per second using flexible compute resources on OCI, load balancing and Autonomous Database.

7 new datacenters will be deployed by Oracle worldwide by the end of 2022. Having established a partnership with Microsoft several years ago, OCI has interconnections with Azure in several regions. (enlarge image)

With the infrastructure services announced this week on OCI, available by the end of the year, Oracle’s cloud will expand the diversity of workloads that can be supported while maintaining simplicity and flexibility, Leo said. Leung. He evokes a strategy aimed at overcoming certain preconceptions about IaaS: the complexity of pricing and scaling up, or the idea that workloads would have to be rewritten for the cloud. “In 5 years of existence, we have focused a lot on the ability to optimize resources without having to rewrite applications,” said the vice president. On IaaS instances, the choice includes bare-metal, VMs and containers, “a diverse family but not so much that it becomes difficult to understand which instances to use,” Leung said. “One of the key elements in VMs is flexible instances, you can specifically size CPUs and memory and only pay for that. With some cloud providers, if you want 80 cores, you have to pay 128 because the 80 option is not offered, or if you want 50, you have to pay 64. On OCI, you indicate the number of processors and memory size and you only pay for the increment”.

AMD instances with low latency NVMe storage

On the Compute part, Oracle announces three new features. The first concerns container instances accessible without having to manage a host VM or having to use Kubernetes. OCI creates the instance with a secure OS image, network, and storage. “It’s a service for those who don’t need the full orchestration of a Kubernetes environment, there are many customers who just need one or more containers to develop their applications and test them”, presents Leo Leung. The second addition concerns the introduction of bare metal machines with the latest AMD processors. AMD E4.Dense instances are intended for workloads using low-latency attached NVMe storage, typically databases (relational or NoSQL), direct virtualized storage, cache, and datawarehouse. Finally, 3rd announcement, 32, 64 and 128 core options will be offered for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution on AMD, for use cases requiring very robust environments.

“On the storage side, the philosophy is the same, the goal is to provide enough types of storage to handle any workload and to provide more flexibility within these instances to simplify adoption. “, then described Leo Leung. “Our storage announcements go in this direction and towards automation”. On block storage, auto-tuning features will allow customers to automatically change the performance characteristics of volumes based on fluctuating demand. Oracle touts them as a unique capability currently on the market to meet peak demand and reduce storage costs when demand is low. A second new feature concerns access to the ZFS file server in high availability. “ZFS is a very popular storage software that many customers use on-premises,” recalls the vice president, OCI. “We make it available in the cloud, the service self-provisions a high-availability, redundant ZFS server that uses OCI’s block volumes for the underlying storage.”

An Oracle CDN and a growing load balancer

The other contributions concern the network part with a CDN (content delivery network) service that Oracle is launching to distribute content as close as possible to end customers (for software updates, for example). The provider also advertises CDN Interconnect, which establishes direct connections with other CDN providers. “Last year, we said we were joining the Bandwidth Alliance started by Cloudflare to work with other cloud providers to reduce the cost of moving data across the internet. CDN Interconnect is a first step. For customers using OCI and Cloudflare, there will be no cost to move their data from our storage to Cloudflare’s network,” explained Leo Leung. Oracle thus eliminates the intermediate cost of moving data to the CDN operator, intervening between the cost of storage in the cloud and that of content distribution via the third-party CDN.

On network services too, Oracle says it has sought to simplify the number of choices offered to the customer when he uses the load balancing service in particular, explained Leo Leung. “What we’ve done is integrate more and more capacity into the load balancer, a network service that any customer is likely to use to manage the traffic coming into their applications,” explains the vice president. Last year, firewall capabilities for the application server (WAF) were brought to it as well as end-to-end monitoring to simplify understanding of what is happening in the network. “We are now announcing enhancements to the Web Application Firewall and integrating other load balancer capabilities to protect network traffic entering the cloud.” Similarly, Web Application Accelerator will cache and compress incoming web requests in the load balancer to improve performance. Two other services are added. Network Visualizer to help identify and correct virtual network misconfigurations and provide recommendations to optimize the network. Finally, vTAP will be used for out-of-band packet capture and inspection to troubleshoot and monitor data without affecting performance.

In conclusion, Leo Leung insists on Oracle’s desire to reinforce simplicity of choice and flexibility on its infrastructure cloud services “by allowing customers to scale on the choices they have made, all while remaining very understandable about what is offered to them”. These 11 infrastructure services will arrive on OCI by the end of the year, with the first two planned being CDN Interconnect and ZFS High Availability.