Some of the world’s largest companies run their mission-critical workloads on Oracle’s next-generation cloud platform – Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) – but what exactly is it? This blog will give a general overview of OCI.
To keep it simple, OCI can be broken down into 7 main categories:
Before I get into what each category does, it’s important to mention the global footprint of ‘regions’ (cloud regions are the actual physical location where public cloud resources are located). Oracle have many generally available regions around the world, along with Multi-Cloud support for Microsoft Azure and a differentiated hybrid offering called ‘Dedicated Region Cloud at Customer’. Oracle currently has 30 cloud regions, with rapid expansion plans to meet their commitment to distributed cloud regions in every country. Here in the UK, there are currently two regions, London and Newport (which are used by the UK government).
So, you now know about the regions where Oracle Cloud is hosted and the 7 main categories which have been built on top of this global footprint, but what is OCI capable of? Let’s now break down each category so you can understand how each piece makes up one very large cloud-shaped puzzle!
At the heart of OCI is the core infrastructure which is comprised of compute, storage, and networking. Compute Services cover Virtual Machines, Bare Metal Servers, containers, a managed Kubernetes Service, and a managed VMWare Service.
The purpose of these services is mainly for performing calculations, executing logic, and running applications. Cloud storage includes disks attached to Virtual Machines, file storage, object storage, archive storage, and data migration services. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers a complete range of storage services to store, access, govern and analyse structured or unstructured data.
Networking features allow you to set up software-defined private networks in Oracle Cloud. OCI provides the broadest and deepest set of networking services with the highest reliability, most security features, and highest performance.
There are numerous flavours of database services, both Oracle and open source. Oracle Cloud is the only cloud that runs Autonomous Databases and multiple versions of it, including OLTP, OLAP and JSON. With OCI, you can run databases and virtual machines, Bare Metal servers, or even Exadata in the cloud. You can also run open-source databases, such as MySQL and NoSQL in OCI (at DSP-Explorer, we don’t only specialise in Oracle, we can also support you with your MySQL and NoSQL databases).
OCI has a managed Apache Spark service called Dataflow, a managed service for tracking data artefacts across OCI called ‘Data Catalog’, and a managed service for data ingestion and ETL called ‘Data Integration’. OCI also has a managed data science platform for machine learning models and training. If this is something of interest to you, our dedicated Data Science team can walk you through the benefits of machine learning for your business with our new Data Science Workshop.
These services include security, identity, and observability and management. OCI has unique features like compartments that make it operationally easier to manage large and complex environments. You’ll be pleased to hear that security is integrated into every aspect of OCI, whether it’s automatic detection or remediation (typically referred to as Cloud Security Posture Management), robust network protection or encryption by default. The fact that OCI is used by the US & UK governments is proof of the highest levels of security.
There is also an integrated observability and management platform with features such as logging, logging analytics, Application Performance Management and many more!
OCI has multiple developer services. The leading Oracle development tool, and one of which we proudly specialise in, is the low-code service, Oracle APEX. You can discover more about our Oracle APEX Services on our website.
For analytics, there is a managed analytics service called ‘Oracle Analytics Cloud’ – this integrates with various third-party solutions. Speak to our Data Science team to understand our analytics capabilities.
OCI has a managed serverless offering, call functions, and API gateway and an Events Service to help customers create microservices and event-driven architectures. Oracle has a comprehensive connected SaaS suite across all business functions, finance, human resources, supply chain, manufacturing, advertising, sales, customer service, and marketing all running on OCI. If you’re looking to migrate an Oracle Application from on-prem to OCI, read more about our Oracle Cloud Application Migration capabilities.
Now that may seem like a long list, however, these seven categories are just the tip of the iceberg. There are currently more than 80 services available in OCI! Fortunately, we have over 25 years of experience working with Oracle and have been working with Oracle Cloud since its inception. Whether you’re dipping your toe in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or migrating your entire data set to it, we can support you with your journey to the cloud. For further reading, discover some of our key Oracle Cloud Services, such as our unique Oracle Cloud Bitesize programme. Alternatively, get in touch with us today and speak to a certified Oracle Cloud expert.