OCI releases new compute, networking and storage services

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is expanding with 11 new compute, networking and storage services and capabilities designed to enable customers to run their workloads faster and more securely at lower costs.

The new offerings provide customers with flexible core infrastructure services, automatically optimising resources to match application requirements and significantly reduce costs, the company states.

Global cloud adoption continues to expand rapidly as business models transform and the demand for secure remote technology accelerates. However, a variety of prevailing public cloud misconceptions are still holding companies back from realising the full benefits of the cloud, OCI states.

For instance, one commonly held belief is that customers have to re-write their applications for the cloud and deal with complex pricing models to reap the benefits of cloud computing. Additionally, many organisations believe that a series of different technology choices have to be made as they scale their operations.

With this announcement, OCI aims to provide customers with more simplicity and flexibility so that scaling can be affordable and simplified, without painstaking re-writes.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure executive vice president Clay Magouyrk says, "OCI continues to break the rules in the cloud, helping customers run their workloads faster, more securely, and more economically. 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 Compute gives customers the option to deploy on bare metal or virtual machines. OCI bare metal instances deliver high performance to enterprise applications, which gives customers maximum control and isolation.

Flexible virtual machines enable customers to maximise total cost of ownership from their workloads with features, such as flexible memory, sub-core burstable CPU, and preemptible instances, enabling them to tune and take advantage of compute elasticity so they consume only what they need.

The ability to scale within a compute instance, as well as scale out by adding more instances, enables customers to gain elasticity without re-writing their applications and reduces the risk and costs of migrating to the cloud.

New services include:

Container Instances: Enables customers to use containers without directly managing the hosting VM or requiring Kubernetes orchestration. OCI takes care of creating the instance with a secure OS image, networking and storage.

AMD E4.Dense Compute Instances: Enables customer workloads that benefit from attached NVMe drives that provide low-latency storage. This includes database workloads (e.g., relational databases, NoSQL databases), virtualised direct-attached storage, caching, and data warehousing.

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution on AMD: Provides customers with new AMD-based 32, 64 and 128 core options, providing them with industry-leading VM deployment density options per SDDC host, which cater to high CPU or high memory use cases. OCI delivers over 2.5x the memory and CPUs per host than other offerings.

OCI Networking helps customers connect securely to OCI's virtual cloud network (VCN) and dynamically create isolated, secure environments for their workloads.

All necessary capabilities, including application firewalls, load balancing, and network peering have been streamlined to simplify provisioning and management.

In addition, flexible load balancing throughout the network stack enables customers to optimise their performance and costs. As a result, OCI Networking can handle global scale networking workloads at lower costs, the company states.

New services and capabilities include:

Content Delivery Network (CDN) Interconnect: Establishes direct peering connections with select third-party CDN providers to offer no cost outbound bandwidth for OCI Object Storage. Origin-to-CDN costs are a significant portion of overall CDN costs and OCI is dramatically reducing those costs for customers, even for third-party CDNs. OCI currently offers this capability in North America for Cloudflare CDN.

Content Delivery Network (CDN) Service: Enables customers to deliver digital content to end users from a nearby location in a geographically distributed network. Customers benefit from integrated APIs, console, UCM billing and stronger integrations between OCI Object Storage, Compute and CDN to reduce origin-server-to-CDN egress fees.

Flexible Web Application Firewall (WAF): Enables customers to define a single WAF policy to protect applications from common exploits (e.g., OWASP Top 10) and enforce the policy on load balancer or on the edge.

Web Application Acceleration (WAA): Supports caching and compression of web HTTP responses in load balancer.

Network Visualiser: Allows customers to perform a configuration-based connectivity check and visualise the network path(s) along with information about the virtual network entities in the path. This helps customers identify and fix common virtual network misconfigurations.

vTAP: Enables OCI Network packet capture and inspection out of band to facilitate troubleshooting, security analysis, and data monitoring without impacting performance.

OCI Storage gives customers high-performance and low-cost cloud storage options through object, file, block, and archive storage. A single type of block volume serves every workload type, from lowest cost to highest performance, and is reconfigurable on-the-fly without disrupting workloads.

This results in a flexible service that can serve even the highest SLA enterprise applications at up to 95% lower cost than other cloud offerings.

New services and capabilities include:

Flexible Block Volumes with Performance-based Auto-tuning: Enables customers to change the performance characteristics of block storage volumes automatically in response to fluctuating demand. This is a unique capability in the cloud market today and helps customers meet peak demands automatically, and helps reduce storage costs when demand is low.

High Availability ZFS: Packages the ZFS file server in a highly available, automated deployment stack that uses OCI Block Volumes for the underlying raw storage.

IDC research vice president cloud and edge infrastructure services Dave McCarthy says, "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.

"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.

These new OCI services and capabilities are planned for 2022.