What is Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure launched in October 2016 with a single region and core services across compute, storage, and networking. Since then, Oracle Cloud has expanded to more than 70 services available in 29 cloud regions worldwide with plans to reach 38 total regions by the end of 2021. OCI offers relational, OLAP, JSON, and NoSQL databases, containers, Kubernetes, serverless functions, Spark, streaming, Jupyter notebooks, VMware–the range of cloud services necessary for nearly any workload. In 2020 alone, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure launched nearly 400 new services, features, and enhancements. While other clouds were originally designed to support web and “scale out” cloud native applications, we saw an opportunity to build our cloud differently. Most companies have three additional classes of applications: enterprise applications that use relational databases, technical applications, and departmental applications. The first two have typically required modifications or even rewrites to run in the cloud, while the third has often been replaced by SaaS alternatives. Oracle has invested deeply to build core infrastructure services from the ground up to make it easy for customers to run all five classes of applications. Atop Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Oracle also offers a broad and deep array of cloud applications (SaaS) for nearly any departmental and industry-specific need.
Benefits
Superior performance
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is designed for applications that require consistent high-performance, including stateful connections to databases, raw processing through CPUs or GPUs, millions of storage IOPS, and GB/s of throughput. Non-blocking networks guarantee that each resource gets predictable high-performance and low latency. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure leverages the latest CPUs, GPUs, networking, and storage technology like NVMe SSD drives. For example, OCI offers bare-metal instances with 51.2 TB of NVMe solid state storage capable of millions of read and write transactions per second. Based on third party testing, Oracle’s compute and storage offer 2-5 times the I/O performance of comparable on-premises or AWS products, with more consistent low latency. Great performance translates into faster results for end customers and greater productivity. For example, financial processes that used to take 2 hours for marketing firm Maritz, now take 10 minutes.
Superior Economics
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Compute offerings are roughly 50% less than comparable AWS or Azure products. Flexible compute shapes enable customers to tailor and pay for instances with the exact amount of cores and memory they need, saving over coarser-grained “t-shirt sized” instances. Oracle’s block storage and database storage are as much as 95% less than other cloud providers. We don’t charge for outbound bandwidth for up to 10TB per month and beyond that charge a fraction of other cloud providers. We offer the same everyday low prices in every global region, including our US and UK government regions. The only price that varies globally is outbound bandwidth, where we add a consistent margin on more expensive network provider costs, yet still offer substantial savings over other cloud providers. Our lower product costs translate into 20-60% lower TCO across a range of workloads versus comparable on-premises or AWS infrastructure. 8×8, an unified communications vendor, saved 80% on their networking costs by moving from AWS to OCI. Many Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services are metered on a per second basis so that you can scale resources when you need them and only pay precisely for those you consume. Discounted annual commitment pricing is available as well via Oracle’s Universal Credits program.
Built-in Security
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure starts with a zero-trust architecture. This means that not only are tenants isolated from one another, but tenants are also isolated from Oracle and vice versa. The isolated network virtualization mentioned earlier plays a role in this clean separation, as well as 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 which 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 over 80 global, regional, and industry standards including SOC, ISO, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FedRAMP, IL-5, GDPR, and more. The combination of secure architecture, technology, development, and process provides a more secure environment than most on-premises facilities, as well as other clouds.