Oracle Cloud Infrastructure – Everything Oracle All At Once

To the uninitiated, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) feels like it gives you all the parts of Oracle, providing you the capability to create, manage and monitor many functions via this platform. Honestly it has so much functionality, at first glance it is often hard to know where to start!

Now if you wanna dip your feet in the future pool of your empire, and see what it is capable of, you can very easily acquire a free tier account with OCI which is a free-for-life access to oracle Cloud where you can Build, test, and deploy applications, as well as $300 worth of free 'credits' to try for use of their paid functions.

Check it out here - https://www.oracle.com/uk/cloud/free/

When you do start your empire, you can feel like a mighty overlord watching over many instances, ensuring that there are many availability domains and within them a failsafe to ensure your Domains remain there for your empire. Or you can go down to the very marrow of the data they are handling by direct querying (for example via a SQL script) the database, or through one of your Virtual Cloud Networks (VCN) that have been setup with the correct programs to interact and manipulate the data.

Of the many functions within OCI, here are just some of the things you can do, including:

• Analytics can be visualised, explored and shared through the Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC).
• Migrate, build and run your Core Infrastructure via the Cloud.
• Building/managing an Autonomous Database with many services to provide an all-in-one database solution.
• From discovering your Data, to refining, processing and providing access/interpretation of said Data. This can then lead to Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) Analytics Outcomes. For example Developers and Data Scientists can prepare and use the same data to build models using an AI service or a data science notebook and python.
• Governance and Administration provides you with the means to create, manage and restrict functionality or permissions/visibility for your users.
• Developer Services can be used to create low code functions, containers, as well as provide a Continuous Deployment and Integration (CI/CD) platform for developers for easy testing and deploying software and applications.
• Application Services included within the API Gateway Service for instance to provide a Comprehensive SaaS suite for your entire business.

This brief look into the possibilities is only the beginning, but if I attempt to list all the aspects of OCI we will be here all year, so instead I will look to show what we typically find our biggest clients at Rittman Mead use OCI for:

1. Autonomous Data Warehouse:

What is it - An autonomous database is a cloud database that uses machine learning to automate database tuning, security, backups, updates and other routine management tasks.

What it is used for - It is often used to create an easily managed self-sufficient Data Warehouse, that is automatically administrated and patched as they go forward and increase the scope of data provisioned from source.

2. Compute Instances

What is it - These are effectively virtual machines, that can be accessed remotely, to run applications, databases, and 3rd party services.

What it is used it for - It predominantly is used for the pre-built Virtual Machines (for example as a Linux machine) on an instance to provide capability of using Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) for ELT work.

3. Oracle Analytics Cloud

What is it - Offering analytics capabilities to all roles within the organisation using OCI, providing a set of tools to derive and share data insights.

What it is used for - It will often be used to provide a reporting base for our transformed data to visualise, and then interrogate the data for analysis and learnings, as well as delivering training running in our Oracle Cloud Interface (OCI) tenancy.

Now this is what our clients are using it for, but that may be different for you, since OCI is a massive, comprehensive bit of kit that has something for everyone. And those capabilities continue to evolve and improve, through their active support at Oracle.

To that end, soon to be added to the many great aspects of OCI is the new Oracle Database 23c that will be made available in the coming months, and has been affectionally code named by Oracle "App Simple".

It has a great new focus, as the code name suggests, to simplify applications and development all while supporting all data types, workloads, and development styles. It provides numerous benefits, and I wanted to go over the some very prominent features here!

Database 23c includes these great features and services:

1. JSON Relational Duality

This is a new approach to address the mismatch between how applications represent data versus how relational databases store data. It simplifies application development done by allowing data to be simultaneously used as application-friendly JSON documents and as database-friendly relational tables.

2. Oracle Database Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery Service

This is to help enhance data protection, and with this function you can more easily address the problems caused by ransomware, pesky outages, or the all too common human error (nobody's perfect).

3. Oracle Full Stack Disaster Recovery Service

This is to help configure, monitor and manage the disaster recovery process for the full stack of technologies used to build applications, which includes important aspects of OCI like middleware, databases, networks, storage, and compute all from the OCI console.

That's not all, you can see all the upcoming functionality here in the news announcement for the upcoming Oracle 23c here.

But that's what is in the future, I also wanted to detail what is new in OCI in 2023:

1. Confidential Computing

OCI considers a robust security one of the most important measure to protect data, which is why they already encrypt customers' data at rest in our Object and Block Storage services as well as in-transit with OCI Vault and OCI Certificates. This now happens whilst the data is in use on OCI E3 and E4 Compute instances thanks to Confidential Computing. The security is provided at the hardware level, which reduces the risk of data exposure and protects against vulnerabilities such as insider threats and firmware compromises.

2. Visual Builder Studio on OCI

This is a team developer hub that integrates agile and collaborative development, code versioning, and continuous integration and delivery automation capabilities, free for OCI customers. The team collaboration includes scrum and kanban dashboards, Git repositories, peer code review, and more! The VBS also includes a CI/CD engine and a declarative web interface for creating build pipelines that automate packaging, testing and deploying your code. It can be found in the console under the Application Development menu.

3. DevOps Shell Stage

This is a feature of the OCI DevOps service that streamlines the ability of teams to create/manage your infrastructure, deploy to other targets, perform tests, and more! Shell Stage allows developers to run bash commands and scripts in a container that runs in your tenancy, which means you can now pass in a command spec with bash commands broken into steps tracked in the Oracle Cloud Console.

4. CD3 automation

CD3 or Cloud Design Deployment Deliverable (as it stands for), is an automation toolkit that is a processor in the form of an excel sheet that converts detailed OCI design specs into runnable Terraform code, or takes an export customer tenancy objects and resources and converts it back into a design spec in Excel format. CD3 is platform independent and you can reuse the generated Terraform files at any time to build similar infrastructure.

5. Oracle Cloud's New Look

OCI has had a fresh coat of paint with a new Redwood Theme, as they look to increase productivity, efficiency and the overall user experience by improving the design.

6. Red Hat Enterprise Linux on OCI

OCI is now a member of Red Hat's Certified Cloud and Service Provider program and can be found in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Ecosystem catalog. This means you can now run the latest version of RHEL7, 8, and 9 on OCI's most popular, current generation of virtual machine shapes and your choice of Intel, AMD, or Arm processors while maintaining access to red Har's support system and knowledge base through your RHEL subscription.

7. File Storage Replication

OCI File Storage service now supports cloud native asynchronous replication as a feature of the highly available, elastic file system. This fully managed feature allows you to replicate your source file systems to target file systems in different availability domains. File Storage replication gives you consistent file system replicas, another OCI first in the industry.

8. SQL Dialog

This is an update to the Oracle Digital Assistant and brings amazing, groundbreaking new capabilities. SQL Dialog can translate natural language input into SQL queries, transmit those to a backend data source, and display the response, all without the need to create utterances, intents, or components! Essentially SQL Dialog provides a framework for the addition of a conversational layer on top of a database.

9.  VMware Cloud Director service on OCVS

This is part of a Multicloud strategy, VMWare Cloud Director greatly simplifies operating a multitenant software defined data centre. You can now configure a single pane of glass across mutliple cloud providers and on-premisse deployments. You'll be able to configure and provision CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources for different lines of business and departments without lengthy custom automation.

10.  AI Document Understanding

It might be familiar if you have used the Vision part of the service, but this has now spun off to a feature with more functionalities and capabilities. You can recognise and extract text, key-value pairs, and even tables from documents like PDFs using pre-built AI models, and automate previously tedious business tasks through APIs and command line tools.

11.  OCI Queue

This is a serverless, high-performance messaging solution for asynchronous inter-process communication. With an intuitive UI to setup and manage queues, you can manage the allocation of resources like servers and storage automatically with other housekeeping activities traditionally associated with deploying other messaging solutions from WebLogic JMS to Kafka. It also has support for Terraform as well as REST APIs and SDKs for multiple languages including JAVA and Python. This helps if you for example have applications and services that need to be decoupled or event-driven.

12.  OCI Container Instances

This is a serverless compute service that enables OCI to instantly run containers without managing any servers. This is a simple way to run an application without the overhead of provisioning a VM, installing a container runtime and managing all of that infrastructure. It will also be used by ML services to deploy models for scoring with REST (Representational State Transfer) services.

Those are some of the recent changes announced by Oracle to OCI, and I am sure that there are many more to come, so keep a look out 👀

As one OCI user to another, I say all the best with your Oracle Data Empire!