IT Executive's Guide To Oracle Student Guide
IT Executive's Guide To Oracle Student Guide
IT Executive's Guide To Oracle Student Guide
Cloud Infrastructure
Run any workload—from AI to enterprise apps—faster and for less, in
the cloud or in your data center.
Table of contents
Introduction ........................................................................................................... 3
1. Enterprise application expertise ............................................................. 4
2. Distributed cloud architecture................................................................. 6
3. AI-optimized performance....................................................................... 8
4. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure benefits ..................................................... 8
5. Workloads best suited to run on OCI ..................................................11
6. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services overview .................................15
Conclusion: Why Customers choose OCI ...................................................19
Introduction
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers services that enable you to build and run any
workload in a high-availability, consistently high performance environment that costs less
than offerings from other hyperscalers. Customers are growing new lines of business,
improving their user experiences, speeding up their operations, and lowering risk and costs
with OCI.
OCI launched in October 2016 with a single region and core services across compute,
storage, and networking. Since then, OCI has expanded, with more than 100 services
available in 48 cloud regions worldwide, and 69 cloud regions managed overall. OCI offers
the breadth and depth of cloud services necessary for nearly any workload. While other
clouds were originally designed to support only web and "scale-out" cloud native applications
and came with difficult-to-understand pricing, we saw an opportunity to build our cloud
differently.
With OCI, we leveraged our industry-leading knowledge of databases, ERP systems, and
enterprise application management to build a better cloud that gets you to your data more
quickly and for a lower price than any alternative hyperscaler. And we did this with simple,
transparent pricing that eliminates the need for tedious and time-consuming discount
program negotiations. We took it a step further by providing the same infrastructure
(compute, storage, and networking) and enabling the same SLAs for every customer in any
We took our deep experience in enterprise applications and data management and
architected a new distributed cloud, with infrastructure to meet you where you are and help
you get where you want to be—in the public cloud, hybrid cloud, on-premises, or even in
environments from other cloud providers. This enables you to access your information and
derive insights how you want to (through an industry-leading enterprise application
portfolio), via the infrastructure topology you prefer. As one of only four Leading Hyperscaler
Vendors recognized as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner ’s Magic Quadrant™ for Strategic Cloud
®
Platform Services, we believe OCI offers the speed, scale, and cost-effectiveness you need for
any workload.
OCI offers full-stack, enterprise-focused AI where you need it. In the same distributed cloud
model, you can run the AI service of your choice, with Oracle’s unique data insights and
industry knowledge baked in, with high performance, high-availability infrastructure, and at a
much lower cost (OCI’s AI infrastructure delivers consistent high performance while providing
up to 41% cost savings compared with other hyperscaler offerings). OCI achieves this by
providing bare metal compute instances that allow you to run latency-sensitive specialized
workloads (for example, generative AI workloads, including large language models (LLMs),
computational fluid dynamics, and simulations) and train models faster through tens of
thousands of GPUs coupled with high performance cluster networking. OCI lets you run AI
workloads just like you would on-premises, but it also lets you scale up and down as needed
and saves you costs versus running the same workloads in your own data center or in
another public cloud.
To address the requirements of all five major classes of applications in a single cloud, we
made design choices and innovated at every layer. We built our cloud regions with greater
resiliency down to the individual node to make it easier to run enterprise applications with
high availability (HA). We minimized hops and protocol translations in the physical network
to achieve sub-millisecond latency within availability domains.
At the virtual networking layer, we don't oversubscribe, so every resource gets maximum
bandwidth without contention from other tenants. We're the first cloud provider to
implement layer 2 network virtualization, which enables customers to natively run VMware
underneath enterprise applications in our cloud and supports other key requirements such
as clustered databases for HA. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is also the first major cloud to
implement “off-box” or isolated network virtualization, which takes network and I/O
virtualization out of the server stack and compute hypervisor and puts it in the network. As a
result, customers can provision self-service, dedicated hosts with no hypervisor overhead,
noisy neighbors, or shared resources. Virtual machines (VMs) also benefit from this
technology, with reduced hypervisor overhead and improved isolation. All Oracle Cloud
services that use compute—including our container engine and MySQL service—also benefit
with consistent high performance.
1. Our public cloud is delivered through networks of globally distributed cloud regions, which
provide the same security and performance while also catering to local environments with
separation through individual cloud realms.
2. Dedicated cloud offerings include Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Dedicated Region, which
allows you to modernize your infrastructure through the deployment of a full OCI region in
your own data center; Oracle Cloud Isolated Region, which takes it a step further and enables
complete air-gapping; and Oracle Alloy, which allows our service provider partners to run
their own branded cloud service offerings.
3. Multicloud is where we’re investing heavily to ensure that customers can run their
workloads in any cloud of their choosing, including Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services,
and Google Cloud Platform. Examples of our multicloud offerings include Oracle
Database@Azure, Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, Oracle MySQL HeatWave on
AWS, and OCI FastConnect, which offers connection options via more than 90 partners.
4. Hybrid cloud offerings allow you to control the location and access of all your data and
applications from the edge to your data center to the cloud. Oracle Exadata
Cloud@Customer and Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer bring the automation and flexible
consumption pricing of Oracle databases and compute infrastructure respectively, into your
data center. Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure lets you move key workloads outside your
data center through ruggedized devices with cloud compute and storage services that can be
deployed at the edge of networks and even in disconnected locations.
It's not just our infrastructure’s performance and price that enable OCI to provide you with
superior AI model training and application development and deployment capabilities; Oracle
takes a full-stack approach to AI. Following the announcement of our generative AI services,
dbInsight shared their take on our approach and stated: “Oracle has a broad strategy
addressing four tiers of the stack, from applications to data, prepackaged AI services, and
infrastructure, where it leverages high-performance, OCI topology for offering NVIDIA GPUs
as “superclusters.” For databases and applications in its sweet spot, Oracle has already begun
adding Gen AI capabilities such as vector data support in Oracle Database 23c and MySQL
HeatWave, along with the beginnings of generative support at the SaaS tier with Oracle
Fusion Cloud CX and HCM.” Oracle Database 23ai represents the next generational leap –
bringing AI to your data, making it simple to power app development and mission critical
workloads with AI.
Through this full-stack approach, Oracle artificial intelligence enables our customers to
achieve a wide array of AI-related objectives, including building and training models,
modifying existing application suites to introduce new AI features and functionality, and
leveraging OCI AI offerings off the shelf to perform better search and retrieval and provide
chatbot-like UI/UX experiences for the consumption and analysis of information. Customers
can customize our AI services using their own data to optimize model quality, maximizing the
return of valid business insights while maintaining the highest enterprise-grade security,
privacy, and governance and benefiting from predictable performance and pricing, whether
on-premises or in the cloud.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is designed for applications that require consistent high
performance, offering stateful connections to databases, raw processing through CPUs or
GPUs, millions of storage IOPS, and gigabytes per second of throughput. Nonblocking
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s compute offerings cost roughly 50% less than comparable AWS
or Azure products. Flexible compute shapes enable customers to tailor and pay for instances
with the exact number of cores and amount of memory they need, allowing them to save
over coarser-grained “T-shirt-sized” instances. Oracle’s block storage and database storage
are as much as 95% less expensive than comparable offerings from other cloud providers.
We don’t charge for outbound bandwidth for up to 10 TB per month, and beyond that, we
charge a fraction of what other cloud providers charge. We offer the same everyday low
prices in every global region, including our US, UK, and Australia government regions. The
only price that varies globally is the cost of outbound bandwidth, yet we still offer substantial
savings over other cloud providers. Our lower product costs translate to 20% to 60% lower
TCO across a range of workloads versus comparable on-premises or AWS infrastructure.
Many Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services are metered on a per-second basis, so you can
scale resources when you need them and only pay for those you consume. The Oracle
Universal Credits program enables even more control by providing a predictable, consistent
way to pay for any OCI service in any region.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure starts with a zero trust architecture. This means that not only are
tenants isolated from one another, but they’re also isolated from Oracle and vice versa. The
isolated network virtualization mentioned earlier plays a role in this clean separation, as does
a custom hardware root of trust to reimage every instance prior to a new customer receiving
it. Above Oracle Cloud’s core infrastructure are layer upon layer of defenses, including default
data encryption, least-privilege identity and access management, and granular resource and
network control all the way out to the edge. Oracle Cloud also has strict code security
development and deployment processes, a full compliance team that is constantly auditing
new regions and services, and a round-the-clock security operations center to guard against
threats. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is compliant with more than 80 global, regional, and
industry standards, including SOC, ISO, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FedRAMP, IL-5, GDPR, and more.
Oracle Cloud has cloud regions around the world and can be deployed through public,
dedicated, multicloud, and hybrid approaches. Oracle Government Cloud regions are
geographically separate from commercial public cloud regions, but they still offer the same
complete set of more than 100 OCI services after official localized certification processes.
They provide the flexibility to support multiple deployment topologies, including air-gapped
regions for highly sensitive workloads and cloud vaulting capabilities for classified, restricted-
access materials. Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud regions offer the same services, pricing, and
experience as Oracle’s public cloud, but they also help organizations address both EU data
sovereignty requirements and the local requirements of individual countries, where
necessary. This includes providing sensitive data and application security through physical
and logical isolation via region-based infrastructure. In some cases, this also means that
Oracle manages and applies all the same updates, patches, and provisioning as it would in a
public cloud, but it also works closely with the customer to ensure that only in-country
human resources certify and deploy them.
Oracle Alloy takes the dedicated region concept further and enables partners to deploy an
Oracle Cloud region under their brand and their control. It allows Oracle customers to
become cloud service providers themselves. Oracle Autonomous Database on Exadata
Cloud@Customer combines all the benefits of having Exadata in your data center with the
simplicity of a cloud service. It helps you meet strict data sovereignty and security
requirements and eliminates many manual database and infrastructure management tasks
while supporting on-premises enterprise applications with the highest Oracle Database
performance.
Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) are a feature of Oracle Database that enables multiple
clustered instances to simultaneously access a single shared database. This provides the low
latency, high-availability, and zero-downtime online maintenance that many traditional
enterprise applications require. Oracle RAC uses Oracle Clusterware for the infrastructure to
bind the interconnected servers so they appear as a single system to end users and
applications. Additionally, it uses a dedicated, high-speed, low-latency, private network
known as a cluster interconnect to synchronize activity and share information between
instances. Managing Oracle RAC on-premises can be cost prohibitive. Customers can instead
leverage Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Database service to create a two-node managed Oracle
RAC instance (or Exadata service to create quarter-, half-, or full-rack Exadata systems with
Oracle RAC), which provides all the benefits of Oracle RAC on-premises. The following
reference architecture shows an Exadata environment, including Oracle RAC, on OCI.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is a natural fit for multiple high performance and I/O-intensive
computing workloads, such as large language model training and inference, crash and
aerodynamic simulations, risk modeling, and digital twins. These workloads involve huge
data sets that need to be analyzed using large-scale compute jobs, which demand high
performance, high throughput, and low variability. On-premises environments are difficult to
size properly. It's easy to overprovision and underutilize or to build too small of an
environment and slow down projects. High performance can be attained, but components
such as GPUs can become out of date quickly, and large-scale HPC networks can be difficult
to maintain. There’s also a long provisioning cycle for AI and HPC clusters on-premises.
Other hyperscaler cloud offerings typically have hypervisor overhead and performance
variability (often referred to as noisy neighbors), which OCI’s architecture and single-tenant
deployment model eliminates.
With Oracle, you can provision HPC clusters on demand and spin up single or hundreds of
instances in minutes. OCI's bare metal instances come with 50 Gb/sec network throughput
(and dual 50 Gb/sec network interface cards), which helps move massive amounts of data
quickly. OCI also offers cluster networking as a service, which allows you to deploy clusters of
high-frequency CPU or GPU instances, and is the industry’s first public cloud with bare metal
HPC computing. This capability natively supports message passing interface workloads that
were once only possible on-premises. This creates a revolution in cloud-based HPC and AI
workload processing.
Superior performance, cluster networking, and the ability to provision bare metal servers in
minutes make Oracle Cloud Infrastructure an ideal choice for running highly intensive HPC
and LLM training and inference workloads. The following reference architecture shows a
typical generative AI LLM training model running on OCI.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Networking lets you create and manage a software-defined
network we call a virtual cloud network (VCN). A VCN is a virtual version of a traditional on-
premises network, where customers can choose their own RFC 1918 IP addresses and define
subnets, route tables, gateways, and firewall rules to support the routing of public and private
traffic. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Load Balancing allows you to create a highly available load
balancer within your VCN so you can distribute requests from the internet or within the VCN.
OCI Load Balancing also offers flexible capabilities that enable you to scale up and down on
demand. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure FastConnect provides 1, 10, or 100 Gb/sec private line
connections between your facilities and Oracle Cloud through more than 90 global network
providers. Oracle also offers the unique ability to directly connect to Microsoft Azure in 12
global locations with about two-millisecond latency and federated identity, addressing a
number of multicloud use cases.
6.3 Storage
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Block Volumes provide an industry first for hyperscalers: a
performance auto-tuning feature that dynamically scales performance as demand changes.
Other hyperscale cloud vendors currently only offer a performance burst, which is limited to
specific storage tiers and isn’t comprehensive across multiple tiers. We offer steady,
predictable, linearly scaling performance. Set your performance range anywhere between
25,000 IOPS and 300,000 IOPS and cut costs based on your daily performance needs. Oracle
Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage provides high-throughput storage with near infinite
capacity for unstructured data such as logs, images, and videos. Workloads such as Spark,
Autonomous Database, and MySQL Heatwave can use OCI Object Storage for large-scale
persistence. Learn more about OCI’s unique storage capabilities.
OCI Data Integration, OCI Streaming, OCI GoldenGate, and a range of other tools enable the
ingestion of data in nearly any format from on-premises and cloud sources. OCI Data Catalog
enables customers to keep track of their data across multiple OCI data stores. Data scientists
have a familiar range of Python-based tools to build, train, and manage machine learning
models with OCI Data Science. Business and IT analysts can use Oracle Analytics Cloud, a
managed service for self-service analysis of data from within your OCI environment as well
as from external data sources.
In addition to these security products, features, and capabilities, OCI is uniquely positioned to
help you combat ransomware attacks using Oracle Zero Data Loss Autonomous Recovery
Service, which enables granular database snapshots for instant recovery. With this service,
you can enable sub-second recovery point objectives, set automatic archival backups to the
cloud, and generate a full backup at the start of the recovery process, enabling up to 8X
faster recoveries. Equally critical is the fact that Zero Data Loss Recovery Service includes
automated, incremental forever backups—protecting and recovering databases up to 50X
faster than traditional methods. Watch this short video to learn more about how to protect
your organization from ransomware with this service.
Oracle DevOps services and tools automate the software development lifecycle,
infrastructure operations, observability, and messaging for developers. Customers can use
popular open source tools such as Jenkins, Terraform, Cloud-init, Grafana, and Spinnaker to
integrate with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. You can access Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
through an intuitive graphical user interface, REST APIs, SDKs, or a CLI. OCI also offers a
browser-based terminal called OCI Cloud Shell. In addition, OCI supports multiple open
source options for search and database management—we’ve invested heavily in this area to
enable additional flexibility, choice, and control for our customers. We offer OCI Database
with PostgreSQL, a fully managed PostgreSQL database service; OCI Cache with Redis, a fully
managed Redis solution that accelerates application response times through in-memory data
Get started
• See how customers are leveraging OCI services and solutions today:
oracle.com/cloud/customers
• Learn about different workloads that can run on OCI and understand the reference
architectures and best practices: docs.oracle.com/solutions
• Enter a new era of productivity with full stack generative AI solutions for your business:
oracle.com/artificial-intelligence/solutions
• Access expertise and resources to help you ensure a smooth, fast, and cost-effective
cloud migration, whether you’re moving just a few applications, a suite of mission-critical
workloads, or a full data center: oracle.com/cloud/migration
• Sign up for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for free, with Always Free Services and additional
services available for a 30-day trial: oracle.com/free
• Launch your first Linux or Windows instance:
docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/Compute/Tasks/launchinginstance
• Test out Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's APIs:
docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/API/Concepts/usingapi
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