Oracle CloudWorld Tour announcements

While Oracle CloudWorld Las Vegas has already taken place, we’re now on tour! Oracle CloudWorld Global Tour brings a slew of new updates and announcements that help to better serve our customers. Not on the schedule for the Oracle CloudWorld Tour? No problem! In this post, you can find the announcements that have been made since the Oracle CloudWorld Las Vegas 2022!

New features and offerings from the Oracle CloudWorld Tour

Core Infrastructure

OCI Superclusters combine our custom RoCE v2 network, high-performance storage, and bare metal compute containing GPUs into a supercomputer in the cloud. OCI is the first platform to offer an AI supercomputer at scale to thousands of customers across every industry. A single supercluster scales up to 4,096 OCI bare metal Compute instances with 32,768 A100 GPUs. OCI Supercluster can train generative artificial intelligence (AI) workloads like large language models (LLMs) faster with near line-rate performance and microsecond latency. Superclusters, featuring NVIDIA A100 or H100 Tensor Core GPUs, are available to order.

Distributed Cloud

Public cloud expansion with a second Singapore cloud region. At CloudWorld Singapore, we announced a second Singapore cloud region, adding to our extensive public cloud region footprint.. EU customers with requirements for EU data residency and sovereignty can soon have access to our EU Sovereign Cloud with regions in Germany and Spain, operated by corporate entities within the EU and staffed by EU residents. Our Chicago cloud region (announced at CloudWorld 2022) is now live, and the Serbia cloud region is now available. Customers locating their workloads in Mexico will have a second, geographically separated region in-country, making a total of 10 planned public cloud regions to add to the 42 currently available.

Data

Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse innovations being announced at OCW Abu Dhabi include:

• Open collaboration. Unlike proprietary data-sharing models, Oracle implements the industry-standard, open-source Delta Sharing protocol. With this open approach, customers can now securely share data with anyone using any application or service that supports the protocol. Sharing data faster improves business decisions by eliminating the use of stale data and inaccurate results. 
• Expansive multicloud functionality. Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse is built for multicloud with secure access to object storage in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud; live SQL connections to Azure SQL, Azure Synapse, Amazon Redshift, Snowflake, MongoDB, Apache Hive, and PostgreSQL; and pre-built connectors to ingest data from over 100 data sources. Autonomous Data Warehouse also now includes query access to Apache Iceberg tables and integration with AWS Glue for retrieving data lake schema and metadata automatically. 
• Simplified data integration and data analysis. Low-code based Oracle Autonomous Database Data Studio provides an intuitive self-service cloud console for analysts and data scientists to load, transform, and analyze data, without relying on IT—no additional products needed and no multi-product integration hassles. A Google Sheets add-on is now part of Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse in addition to the already available Microsoft Excel add-in that accelerates users’ ability to derive insights based on a single source of truth.
• High performance storage at the same cost as object storage. Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse’s Exadata storage cost is reduced by over 75 percent, bringing it in line with the cost of object storage, while delivering up to 20X faster query performance. This enables customers to completely rethink their current approach to data warehouse/data lake architectures and store all their data in Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, and in turn to accelerate time-to-actionable insights—all at a lower cost.

New Global Study. 70% of business leaders would prefer a robot to make their decisions. People feel overwhelmed and under qualified to use data to make decisions and this is hurting their quality of life and business performance, according to a new study – The Decision Dilemma – by Oracle and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, New York Times bestselling author. The study of more than 14,000 employees and business leaders across 17 countries found that people are struggling to make decisions in their personal and professional lives at a time when they are being forced to make more decisions than ever before.

Oracle Database 23c Free – Developer Release Oracle announced a free version of Oracle Database 23c. The new Oracle Database 23c Free—Developer Release meets growing demand from developers and organizations worldwide to access the newest features in Oracle Database 23c “App Simple.” Developers now have access to innovative Oracle Database features that simplify development of modern data-driven applications, getting them ready for the planned release of Oracle Database 23c, the next Long-Term Support Release. The free version is available for download as a Docker Image, VirtualBox VM, or Linux RPM installation file, without requiring a user account or login. A Windows version will follow shortly. Additional information is available here.

A MySQL HeatWave migration program has launched providing access to free step-by-step guides outlining best practices, free training resources, and free expert guidance to migrate to MySQL HeatWave from MySQL on- premises, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), or Amazon Aurora. Now every step is documented, taking the guess work out of the migration process.

Analytics

MySQL HeatWave on AWS enhancements. A new scale-out data management layer built on S3 improves data availability and speeds up error recovery by 40X. Support for MySQL Autopilot auto shape prediction in the console makes it even easier for customers to always get the best price-performance. Additional information is available here

MySQL HeatWave on OCI enhancements. A new small (32GB) shape, which only costs $16 per month, makes it attractive for customers with smaller data sizes to use HeatWave to accelerate their queries. Price-performance is improved by 15% for larger workloads by increasing the amount of data that can be processed by a 512GB HeatWave node from 800GB to 1TB. Additional information is available here

New MySQL Autopilot Auto unload advisor to help customers reduce costs by recommending unloading database tables that were never or rarely queried. Additional information is available here.

AI and ML

OCI Data Science will add support for bare metal and A1 GPUs to accelerate model training for tasks that involve computationally intensive ML use cases such as deep learning. There will be support for GPU shapes for Notebook Sessions, Model Deployment, and Jobs: BM.GPU2, BM.GPU3, BM.GPU4, BM.GPU.GU1/BM.GPU.A10, and VM.GPU.GU1/VM.GPU.A10.

New MySQL HeatWave AutoML capabilities—not available on Amazon Redshift ML or Snowflake. Support for multivariate time series forecasting and unsupervised anomaly detection expand the machine learning use cases for MySQL HeatWave. MySQL HeatWave now supports recommender systems—which recommend products to buy, movies to watch, and more—and fully automates the process for customers, including algorithm selection, feature selection, and hyperparameter optimization—saving data analysts significant time and effort. By comparison, other cloud services only recommend algorithms, putting the burden on users to select the most appropriate one, and manually tune it. Additional information is available here.

Application Development

Serverless Kubernetes experience with the new Virtual Nodes capability in OKE simplifies and enables reliable operations of containerized applications at scale and relieves customers from having to manage Kubernetes control plane or worker node infrastructure. Virtual Nodes provides granular, pod-level elasticity with per-pod pricing based on consumed resources – while eliminating the operational overhead of managing, scaling, upgrading, and troubleshooting worker nodes’ infrastructure. This capability is generally available now.

Container Instances is a new service in OCI for applications and container use cases where container orchestration like Kubernetes isn’t required. This is a new serverless compute service that enables customers to instantly run containers without managing any servers. Container Instances run on an optimized, dedicated environment with strong isolation for improved security. They can also support very demanding apps- with customers able to allocate all the CPU/Memory resources available for the compute shape to a single container instance. Container instances are priced the same as ‘regular’ OCI compute, but eliminate the need to provision, manage, patch, and troubleshoot a virtual machine just to run containers. This service is generally available now.

Add-on lifecycle management capability provides customers greater flexibility to install and configure their chosen operational software or related applications to the Kubernetes clusters running their applications. Add-ons include essential Kubernetes software deployed on the cluster, such as CoreDNS and kube-proxy, and access to a growing portfolio of related applications, such as the Kubernetes Dashboard, Oracle Database Operator, and more. OCI manages the full lifecycle of the add-on software, from the initial deployment and configuration, through ongoing operations, including upgrades, patching, scaling, rolling configuration changes, and more. This capability is generally available now.

Workload identity enables customers to enhance their security posture with the ability to specify granular identity and access management controls for the applications running on the Kubernetes worker nodes at the pod level. This provides applications policy-driven access to other cloud resources without having to store credentials as secrets in the Kubernetes cluster. This capability is generally available now.

Additional capabilities for OKE such as support for larger Kubernetes clusters with a default of 2,000 worker nodes and financially backed SLA based on Kubernetes API server availability are also available now.

Preemptible (“spot”) instances support for OKE enables customers to specify preemptible capacity for worker nodes to optimize costs for workloads that can tolerate interruptions, such as tests. Customers can save up to 50% lower costs compared to on-demand instances.

MySQL HeatWave developer program provides developers with step-by-step instructions and code to build MySQL HeatWave-powered applications for popular use cases as well as resources including reference architectures, development tools, how-to blogs, and more.

Fundamentals (Security, Management, Observability, Governance)

AWS support for Oracle Cloud Migrations will allow for seamless migration of Amazon Web Services EC2 virtual machines to compute instances on OCI, significantly reducing the effort and complexity involved. This will lower the barrier for AWS customers to adopt a multicloud strategy and move to OCI Cloud.

Want to know more?

New updates come out consistently, so keep an eye out on the What's New in OCI blog or YouTube!