Cloud Computing Overview
A guide to Oracle’s infrastructure-as-a-service offering
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is the cloud computing service offered by Oracle. Like other leading cloud computing services, Oracle Cloud allows you to pay for IT services as you go, instead of having to make large investments in hardware, software, and databases.
Unlike other cloud computing services that were built a decade ago and evolved over time, Oracle Cloud was built from the ground up based on learnings from first-generation cloud models. As a result, Oracle created a cloud that offers better performance, security, and pricing.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
OCI is Oracle’s IaaS and PaaS offering. OCI is the foundational layer of Oracle Cloud, and provides organizations with networking, compute, storage, and platform services that can run even the most critical and data-intensive workloads in the cloud.
Because OCI was built using insights from first-generation clouds, it’s able to offer a number of benefits from stellar performance to comprehensive security.
Cloud Performance
Oracle designed its cloud offerings for superior performance, with low-latency, high-throughput networks that run even HPC uses cases in the cloud. OCI has a non-oversubscribed, highly scalable network with approximately 1 million network ports in each availability domain, high-speed interconnections, and latency at under 100 microseconds between the hosts in an availability domain.
Oracle also offers high bandwidth, ultra-low latency RDMA networks for high-performance computing workloads, with latency as low as 1.5 microseconds. Because of its design, it is one of the few public clouds that can offer guaranteed, end-to-end SLAs across availability, manageability, and performance.
High availability
OCI services are available across a number of geographic regions. Each region has at least one availability domain, which is a collection of one or more data centers. Availability domains are unlikely to fail at the same time because they’re physically isolated from one another.
Each availability domain contains three sets of hardware and infrastructure, called fault domains. With fault domains, you can spread your instances out to avoid putting them all on a single piece of physical hardware in the availability domain. That way, if one piece of hardware fails or needs to undergo maintenance, it won’t affect the other fault domains.
A high-bandwidth, low-latency network connects all of the availability domains within a region. This protected network is the basis for Oracle Cloud’s high availability and disaster recovery. Because of this design, Oracle is able to offer 99.9% availability SLAs for many Oracle Cloud services.
Cloud computing price-performance
When organizations move over to OCI, they often find that they can run the same workloads using fewer compute servers and block storage volumes. Because they’re using fewer resources, customers often pay less to run their workloads on OCI than with other cloud infrastructure providers.
For instance, Oracle offers more than 3X better price-performance than AWS for general purpose compute instances.
Built-in cloud security
Oracle designed OCI with a security-first approach. OCI offers built-in security such as customer isolation, data security, internal threat detection, and automated threat remediation. Customers’ data and traffic are separated and hidden from other users by isolating compute and network resources.
OCI uses granular customer isolation to limit the attack surface and has layers of defense with built-in firewalls, DDoS protection, and encryption. Customers can use adaptive authentication to adjust how a user’s identity is verified based on their recent activity and perceived risk. Plus, Oracle has one of the broadest portfolios of cloud security services.
Strategic integrations
Oracle has partnered with both Microsoft and VMware to help businesses take full advantage of the cloud in a way that works for each organization’s needs. Through the Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure Interconnect, customers can use the best of both clouds with low-latency, high-bandwidth connectivity.
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution offers customers the same VMware experience that they know on-premises but with the benefits of cloud elasticity and security—and an integrated network between VMware and fifty OCI services.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customer stories
Toyota moves high-performance workloads to Oracle Cloud
Toyota wanted to increase the efficiency of automobile design and development through computational tests and simulations. The company was doing its high-performance computing on-premises, but was looking into cloud services to quickly increase resources and test new technologies.
After looking at a number of other cloud services, Toyota chose OCI for the foundation of its computational simulations, while also continuing to use current on-premises systems.
Toyota increased car design and development efficiency and optimized costs by running high-performance workloads for computational simulations on OCI. They can now also flexibly handle testing new technologies.
OCI quickly supports Zoom’s rapid growth
In April 2020, as Zoom became an essential service for both businesses and educators, the company’s number of daily meeting participants grew to 300 million from about 10 million in December 2019.
Zoom chose OCI to help it meet the sudden increase in demand.
“We explored multiple platforms, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was instrumental in helping us quickly scale our capacity and meet the needs of our new users,” said Eric S. Yuan, Zoom’s CEO.
Oracle’s engineering team took the company from deployment to live production in nine hours and helped Zoom smoothly scale to support millions of concurrent meeting participants.
FedEx responds to changes 2X faster with cloud automation
FedEx wanted to bring the same innovation that it applies to package delivery and customer communications to its internal operations. Leaders moved to transform the company with the most innovative technology, which meant a big move to cloud applications.
FedEx chose Oracle Cloud ERP, EPM, SCM, and Analytics along with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Autonomous Database.
FedEx standardized more than 220 operations using Oracle Cloud Applications, automated processes using Oracle Digital Assistant and OCI integration services, and empowered 3,000 employees to make data-driven decisions using Oracle Analytics Cloud.
FedEx also reduced manual effort and increased code deployment speed for a 2X faster time to market.
OCI: More cost-effective than AWS
The above examples are just a small sample of how the world’s biggest corporations trust their data to OCI. Automation, scalability, and other benefits all come in a cost-effective package that saves money over the competition. Get started with your free trialL today.