Modern enterprises are constantly evolving with rapidly changing expectations of consumers. For enterprises around the world, business agility and flexibility are cornerstones of their digital transformation journey. At Oracle, we understand that your cloud infrastructure needs to adapt to the dynamic nature of your business. You need the flexibility to scale up your application resources to meet increasing customer needs or scale down to lower cost. As the gateway between users and your application, your load balancers are a critical piece of your scalable application infrastructure.

We’re excited to introduce dynamic shapes for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Load Balancing service. You can now update the bandwidth shape of your load balancer within minutes, while preserving your backend application and load balancer instance properties.

Introducing Dynamic Update of Load Balancer shapes

When you launch a load balancer instance, you specify a shape that determines the load balancer’s total preprovisioned maximum bandwidth for ingress and egress traffic. Until now, you had to choose a shape with enough room to support your anticipated future performance needs. If your bandwidth needs changing, you had to launch a new instance and migrate your applications to the new instance.

With the new dynamic load balancer shapes feature, you can now update the bandwidth shape of your existing load balancer without changing any of the other load balancer or backend server properties. You don’t have to reconfigure or reinstall your applications to take advantage the new shape.

Updating the Load Balancer’s Shape

Let’s pretend you’re the admin of the legendary MuShop, an e-commerce site for cat products built as a set of micro services and hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. You have an annual sale coming up and need to ensure that the site can handle traffic spikes during the sale. Based on past sales traffic data, you’ve determined that you need to update the load balancer shape to the largest shape option. 

With the new dynamic load balancer shapes feature, you can now update the bandwidth shape of your load balancer in a few minutes by following these steps:

  1. In the Console, under the Core Infrastructure group, go to Networking and click Load Balancers.

  2. Open the details page of the load balancer instance whose bandwidth shape you want to change.

  3. Click Update Shape. The Total Bandwidth list displays the bandwidth shape options that are available.

A screenshot of the Loading Balancer Details page with the shape circled in red and a note pointing to it that says, “Note the current shape is 400 Mbps.”

4.  Select the new shape of the load balancer from the list, and click Save Changes. Do note changing the bandwidth size of the load balancer resets the existing sessions of the load balancer. 

A screenshot of the Update Shape screen with 8000 Mbps selected in the drop-down menu.

After the workflow request completes, the shape is updated to the new bandwidth, while the other load balancer and backend properties remain unchanged. When you change the shape, you’re billed based on the new shape rate. If you’re using non-universal credit (UCM) SKUs, to prevent incurring overage charges, ensure that your contract includes the shape you’re updating the load balancer to.

A screenshot of the Load Balancer Details page with the Shape size updated and a note in orange that says, “Shape has changed while other properties remain the same.”

You can use the UpdateLoadBalancerShape operation with the API or other developer tools to change the load balancer shape.

New 10-Mbps Paid Load Balancer Shape

We currently offer a 10-Mbps load balancer shape as part of our Always-Free tier SKUs. However, it’s limited to one per customer. We’re excited to introduce a new paid 10 Mbps load balancer shape SKU that complements our current Always-Free tier offer and enables you to deploy multiple 10-Mbps load balancer instances in your tenancy.

A screenshot of the Create Load Balancer page with the Micro setting in the Choose Total Bandwidth section circled in red, with a note that says, “New micro (10 Mbps) paid shape.”

You can’t change the bandwidth shape of a 10 Mbps Always-Free tier load balancer. If you want to increase your bandwidth size, upgrade to a paid shape type.

Next Steps

For more information,see Creating Load Balancers and Changing the Load Balancer Bandwidth in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure documentation. We want you to experience these new features and all the enterprise-grade capabilities that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers. It’s easy to try them out with a US$300 free credit. As always, your feedback drives our feature roadmap and product development. Contact us through your Oracle sales team or email if you have any feedback or load balancer feature requests.