Last updated on June 1, 2022
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Its Key Benefits
What is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and Data as a Service (DaaS) capabilities in a single, comprehensive platform. With OCI, Oracle has welded an array of affordably-priced compute, storage, database, networking, and platform services geared towards the enterprise, including small and medium-sized ones.
Complementing these services are technologies such as Oracle Autonomous Database, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, and Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing. Taken all together, these give OCI the ability to handle large, data-intensive workloads with better security. For organizations transitioning from on-premises data centers to the Cloud, OCI is an ideal solution.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Core Concepts
- Tenancy: When you sign up for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, oracle assigns you a tenancy which is basically a secure and segregated compartment that holds all your cloud resources. The name of your tenancy is the name of your Oracle cloud account which can be changed.
- Compartments: Compartment is another logical concept that helps you organize and control access to your cloud resources. A compartment is a collection of related cloud resources like cloud networks and computes instances that can be accessed by users with the required permissions. You can think of your tenancy as the root compartment and can create further compartments within the root compartment.
- Access policy and how policy inheritance works: Admins can create access policies to control who can access the resources within each compartment. The compartment hierarchy can go up to six levels deep. A policy attached to a specific compartment will be inherited by all of its sub-compartments.
- Limitations on moving resources between compartments: Only a few resources, such as Container Engine for Kubernetes clusters, functions, or policies, cannot be moved to another container. When moving resources with dependencies with other resources, it may take some time for the dependencies to become visible in the new compartment. For some resources, the dependencies need to be moved independently. Once moved, the policies of the new compartment will be applied to the resource right away.
- Regions, Region Subscriptions & Realms: Your home region is the geographical region where your Oracle account and IAM (Identity Access Management) resources were created. The home region can’t be changed, but a tenancy can be subscribed to other regions, and the IAM resources of the home region will be extended to that region. A realm is a logical collection of regions and a tenancy can exist only in one realm with access to the regions within that realm. Realms are completely isolated from each other. Oracle Cloud infrastructure has a single commercial realm and multiple government cloud realms.
Services provided by Oracle Cloud
OCI has a broad range of services grouped into IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and DaaS.
1. Infrastructure as a Service
OCI’s compute capacities ranges from bare metal servers and virtual machines (VMs) to graphics processors units (GPUs), high-performance computing (HPC), and container orchestration. OCI has various storage options, including local, file, object, archive, and block for vital storage use cases and workloads.
Central to OCI design is its isolated network virtualization concept. OCI’s network virtualization decouples the hypervisor’s network, significantly reducing security risks that underpin most hypervisors.
2. Platform as a Service
OCI’s PaaS builds from IaaS offerings, which integrate various Oracle and other open-source frameworks. Some of OCI’s popular PaaS offerings include:
- Application development, where developers can design, code, test, and deploy modern intelligent applications in the cloud
- Cloud database, where organizations can access high-performance versions of Oracle Autonomous Database with reduced management workloads
- Content management, where organizations can personalize their customer experiences quickly via a centralized tool
- Integration, where developers can integrate various apps and data from disparate sources to create insightful analytics
- Business analytics, where organizations can gain comprehensive business intelligence (BI) on their data via embedded machine learning algorithms
3. Software as a Service
OCI SaaS offerings are ready-to-use applications that organizations can leverage for various use cases. You can use them to automate various operations, including human resources, enterprise resource planning (ERP), sales and marketing, supply chain management, and financial management, among others.
4. Data as a Service
OCI’s DaaS is a data aggregator. You can leverage it to access more than 135 million contact records worldwide with more than 90 firmographic attributes. Organizations can use this data to normalize, standardize, and correct their contact data in real-time. Also, DaaS can allow such organizations to achieve completeness and accuracy of their data.
Oracle Autonomous Database
Oracle Autonomous Database (OAD) is a machine learning (ML)-powered cloud database. The database takes care of itself, minimizing database administrators (DBAs)’ intervention and eliminating the often manual and error-prone tasks.
The “self-driving” aspect of OADs frees DBAs from mundane tasks while enforcing security so that they can concentrate on more innovative and high-level work. Central to the performance of OADs is the adaptive ML algorithms. These algorithms can automatically patch, back up, tune, and upgrade the database anytime, while the system is running to ensure maximum availability.
Oracle launched OAD in 2017, starting with Oracle Database 18c and later versions. As a database management software, Oracle 18c itself is not autonomous. The automation features that Oracle has built on top of it are what make it an autonomous database. Oracle provides this combination as a cloud service, which it describes as “self-driving,” “self-securing,” and “self-repairing.”
- Self-driving. An OAD automates all the database operations, including provisioning, monitoring, backup, tuning, and optimization. However, this doesn’t mean it eliminates the role of DBAs completely. You still need DBAs to manage some database tasks like connecting apps to the database.
- Self-securing. An OAD has inbuilt capabilities that can protect it against malicious internal users and external attacks. Organizations can leverage OADs to minimize increasing security concerns about unencrypted or unpatched databases.
- Self-repairing. An OAD has self-preventative protection mechanisms against planned and unplanned downtimes. As such, you can rapidly and automatically recover from outages without any downtimes.
Oracle Autonomous Database Components
An OAD consists of two primary components that align it with workload types: data warehouse and transaction processing. A data warehouse uses already prepared data to perform business intelligence operations. It also manages all the database management lifecycle operations, including query scans.
Transaction processing, on the other hand, facilitates time-based transactions such as real-time personalization and analytics. It involves fewer records based on predefined operations.
The primary benefits that you can derive from autonomous databases are three-fold. First is the cost savings you get. By reducing the number of DBAs to manage OADs or redeploying them elsewhere into more strategic functions, you can save on costs.
Second, OADs can help you enhance service levels by eliminating manual and error-prone database operations via automation. Transitioning to OAD allows DBAs to refocus their data science skills on more value-driven insights for the business.
Finally, you achieve maximum performance, database uptime, and security with OADs. Unlike traditional databases, OAD leverages machine learning algorithms designed for automatic performance-tuning and automatic patching in real-time. This ensures you achieve maximum performance and security.
Benefits of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers the following benefits to enterprises:
- Ability to build on existing, on-premises investments – Organizations that are already heavily invested in on-premises solutions can move them to the Cloud with ease. They have full control over their migration efforts, e.g. virtualization, server and storage setups, and data center location, but they also have the option to utilize Oracle’s expertise when they need it.
- High performance worthy of mission-critical applications – Enterprises, both large and small and those in between, need their applications to be up all the time. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers bare-metal servers that can process huge data sets in real-time, leveraging high-performing, highly-scalable Oracle databases and related technologies such as Oracle Real Applications Clusters. These servers also utilize non-volatile memory express (NVME) storage that can handle several dozens of terabytes per instance.
- Highly secure infrastructure – Organizations need their applications, networks, and data to be secure from compromising breaches that are potentially damaging to their reputations. Moreover, governments stipulate that enterprises must comply with strict security standards. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is built with security in mind, separating computing and network resources and allowing the setup of in-depth defense through built-in firewalls, integration with identity access management tools, multi-factor authentication, and data encryption, among others.
- Open architecture – With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, your organization does not need to be locked to a single vendor. OCI offers cross-cloud support, allowing it to integrate with Microsoft and other cloud providers. You can run both Oracle and non-Oracle workloads, or even just the latter, on OCI, since OCI provides for interoperability through standards compliance. It also supports open-source technology and is programming language-agnostic, allowing it to integrate with DevOps and IT tools from various vendors, and run on both Windows and Linux servers.
- Oracle expertise – For organizations that require assistance in their efforts to transition to the cloud with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle offers help from its experts.
Some Key Concepts and Terminology of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Regions and Availability Domains
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is distributed across regions and availability domains. An availability domain consists of one or more data centers placed inside a region, while a region is a specific geographic area. One or more availability domains make up a region. A virtual cloud network, for example, is a region-specific Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resource, while a compute instance is an availability domain-specific resource. Availability domains are fault-tolerant, separated from one another, and unlikely to fail at the same time or be harmed by the breakdown of another availability domain.
Bare Metal Host
Without the use of a hypervisor, bare metal computes resources that operate directly on bare metal machines. You have complete control over the hardware CPU, RAM, and network interface card (NIC) when you deploy a bare metal compute instance.
Compartments
You may organize and manage access to your cloud systems using compartments. A compartment is a collection of connected resources (like instances, virtual cloud networks, and block volumes) that may only be accessible by specific groups with authorization from an administrator.
Object Storage
Object Storage is a storage architecture that lets you store and manage data in the form of objects. Data files of any size (up to 10TB) and type can be used. Data uploaded to Object Storage may be accessible from any location. When you need to store a massive amount of data that doesn’t change often, use Object Storage. Backing up, data transfer, and maintaining unstructured data such as logs or sensor-generated data are all common uses for Object Storage.
Oracle Cloud Identifier (OCID)
Each Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resource has its own Oracle-assigned identifier, called Oracle Cloud Identifier.
Parallels RAS makes things easier on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Parallels® Remote Application Server (RAS) offers robust support for the delivery of a wide range of resources, including virtual desktops, applications, physical PCs, folders, and data, on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. With Parallels RAS, your organization can deploy and manage application and desktop delivery across various environments. It makes on-premises, public cloud, hybrid, and hyperconverged deployments easy and fast.
Parallels RAS is compatible with different operating systems and technologies, including Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), using a wide variety of hypervisors, including Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix Acropolis, and Scale Computing HC3. Parallels RAS does VDI deployment using customized templates, allowing guest VMs to be created on the fly.
Using Parallels RAS, administrators can provide users with access to their PCs and other devices remotely and with full administrative permissions. Moreover, Parallels RAS allows quick delivery of dedicated remote PCs from a hosted desktop infrastructure (HDI), such as HPE Moonshot System and Atrust Remote PC Array. HDI is used when VDI does not meet the required computing power in data-intensive applications such as data mining and video or graphic editing.
