What’s new in OCI

April 15, 2024 | 69 minute read
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What's New moves to monthly posts

Hello readers, and thank you for following along with our weekly news updates! As of March 2024, we have transitioned to a monthly publication cadence with new posts every month on the latest and greatest news highlights, with links and resources for more reading. Don’t forget to bookmark the What’s New blog homepage for easy access to each of these new monthly posts, and check out our monthly What’s New videos, too. 

 

 

 

Week of 26th February, 2024 

Gartner recognizes Oracle as a Leader based on our Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute and a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools in this report.

 

Week of 19th February, 2024 

With the latest features, fixes, and enhancements, OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery is now available in all OC1 regions worldwide. Customers can automate the process of recovering one or more business systems without redesigning existing infrastructure, databases, or applications and without specialized management or conversion servers.

 

Week of 12th February, 2024

Over 16 new OCI services and features have been approved by FedRAMP, enhancing AI, DevOps, and security capabilities. There are now 93 FedRAMP-authorized services available to Oracle's U.S. government customers.

Week of 5th February, 2024

As part of Oracle's wider strategy for Africa, a new public cloud region in Kenya will expand OCI's footprint beyond Johannesburg, and unleash significant innovation and competition in the continent.

Week of 29th January, 2024

OCI Generative AI service is now generally available with a choice of models from Cohere and Meta in the cloud and on-premises to address a wide range of business use cases, particularly focused on text generation, summarization, and semantic similarity tasks. Generative AI Agents service with a RAG agent enables users to converse with diverse enterprise data sources through natural language without the need for specialist skills. 

 

Week of 22nd January, 2024

For the sixth consecutive year, Oracle Autonomous Database scores highest in all use cases in the Gartner® Critical Capabilities for Cloud Database Management Systems for operational use cases. Check out more details from the recently published report in our blog.

Learn more about the releases that are part of the Oracle Critical Patch Update (CPU) January 2024 for Oracle Java SE, supported by Java Management Service and integrated with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Platform services.

 

Week of 15th January, 2024

Organizations adopting Kubernetes face many challenges in getting networking configured correctly. Troubleshooting a Kubernetes cluster’s network configuration can be complex and error-prone. OKE’s network path analysis tests pinpoint connectivity issues and offer actionable insights on missing configurations, simplifying the troubleshooting process. 

The Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) team’s ongoing commitment to deliver regular innovative product updates to OAC is as strong as ever with the new year! Check out this blog for highlights of the top features in this update, including links to demos on YouTube.

 

Week of 18th December, 2023

This will be our last update for 2023. We are thankful to everyone who follows this blog, and look forward to bringing you more of What's New in 2024! 

On December 12th, Oracle announced the opening of a second Oracle Cloud Region in Chile, making it the first hyperscaler to have two regions in the country. With the new Oracle Cloud Valparaíso Region and the existing region in Santiago, Oracle will help organizations across all industries in Chile strengthen business continuity while addressing data residency and sovereignty requirements.

Giving you more flexibility and choice, you can now operate and manage the new Oracle Database@Azure directly within Microsoft’s data centers, starting with Azure East US, with more regions globally in 2024. With Oracle Database@Azure, you can use your preferred cloud services across your Oracle and non-Oracle workloads to operate, manage, and innovate across them all.

The latest enhancements to the backup capabilities in our Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure and Cloud@Customer (ADB-D and ADB-CC) are designed to streamline your data management experience, offering greater flexibility and efficiency. 

Previewed at Oracle CloudWorld 2023, the Enterprise Edition of MicroTX is now available for download. The latest features include Clustered Transaction Coordinator, Transaction Recovery, Store, and Caching, as well as MicroTX Console, RAC Support, and more! With this release, MicroTx is now ready for your production deployments.

It’s important that the compliance programs Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers keep pace with our customers’ requirements and our regional expansion efforts. We are pleased to announce the fall OCI assessments are complete and new compliance documents are now available on demand through the Compliance Documents service in the Oracle Cloud Console.

 

Week of 11th December, 2023

Oracle has been named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Strategic Cloud Platform Services, previously known as Cloud Infrastructure and Platform Services. Gartner defines strategic cloud platform services as standardized, automated, public cloud offerings integrating infrastructure services (e.g., computing, network and storage), platform services (e.g., managed application and data services) and transformation services (programs/resources that help customers adopt cloud-oriented IT delivery models). 

On December 6th, Oracle announced the opening of an Oracle Cloud Region in Colombia in partnership with Claro, becoming the first major cloud provider to establish a public cloud region in the country. Claro is one of the host partners for the new Oracle Cloud Bogotá Region, and through its partnership with Oracle it becomes the first telecommunications operator to offer Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) services to organizations across Colombia.

Mixed-shape clusters provide the flexibility to combine different host shapes with varying core counts within a single cluster. The feature allows you to combine different compute shapes within the same processor family, enabling you to tailor your compute resources to your specific workload requirements.

Traditionally, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution environments were limited to a single cluster within a single SDDC, which could be a bottleneck when it came to resource allocation and management. We now allow customers to add up to six clusters within a single SDDC from the Oracle Cloud Console, providing simplified management, workload separation, cost efficiency, cluster variety, and scalability.

OCI Operations Insights (OPSI) is a solution that helps you gather, analyze, and plan for enterprise growth. Check out this blog to learn about the latest features in SQL-level application workload telemetry, new and enhanced dashboards, and more!

Week of 4th December, 2023

Oracle Analytics was one of the earliest analytics solutions to include machine learning (ML), natural language processing, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities - and continues to incorporate new technology as the field grows. Read this blog to learn the three types of AI capabilities in Oracle Analytics: Built-in AI-augmented capabilities, integrated ML capabilities, and integrated AI capabilities.

This release enables developers to easily build secure and scalable enterprise cloud, mobile, and SaaS apps with low-code. App builders now have access to a variety of native enterprise features and capabilities that include end-to-end process automation, collaborative development, and new user interface (UI) components. Read this blog to get the highlights of Oracle APEX 23.2 for Enterprise-Scale Application Development.
 

Week of 20th November, 2023

At SC23, we announced our upcoming plans to offer OCI Compute instances powered by the NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip. The upcoming OCI BM.GPU.GH200 instance is a bare-metal GPU shape designed to support the most intense AI inference workloads that need fast, high-capacity memory for large language models (LLMs) and recommender systems. 

OCI Database with PostgreSQL provides full PostgreSQL compatibility while letting users take advantage of OCI’s flexible, high-performance, high-availability infrastructure with built-in security and simple pricing. In addition, this OCI implementation delivers superior scalability combined with reduced administrative demands.

DBSAT helps assess Oracle databases' security posture and helps guide customers through risk mitigation by looking into the database configuration, users, roles, privileges, and sensitive data. It currently powers Oracle Data Safe Security Assessment, Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall database security posture management, DBSAT compliance standards in Enterprise Manager, and the security assessment portion of the Autonomous Health Framework. The latest release introduces Oracle best practices, improves the security findings, and includes updates to support the latest US Department of Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) for Oracle Database.

OCI API Gateway, a critical component for managing, deploying, and securing APIs, is now supported with digitalML’s ignite platform. This combination provides a powerful API approach to hybrid and multicloud deployments, enabling frictionless portability of APIs across multiple runtime environments, and significantly enhancing the ease of operating in multicloud environments. 

Week of 13th November, 2023

Stack Monitoring supports the discovery and monitoring of applications and their underlying tech stack components. Enterprise Edition introduces a set of advanced monitoring features that include the ability to create custom metrics to monitor conditions unique to your environment, use Machine Learning to identify performance anomalies, and extend monitoring visibility to other resources outside Stack Monitoring’s built-in capabilities.

The latest OPSI release offers a weekly News Reports feature across the enabled resources to help you make critical decisions about your databases and hosts, using historical and long-term data. The use cases it supports include capacity planning, forecasting, and enterprise-wide performance optimization.

The latest enhancements to the ListAlarmStatus and RetrieveDimensionStates APIs now allow you to filter alarms by resource ID and status. These additions simplify creating visualizations, which provide a comprehensive view of all your alarms and their status in the context of a single resource or your entire resource stack. 

Microsoft is using OCI AI infrastructure, along with Microsoft Azure AI infrastructure, for inferencing of AI models that are being optimized to power Microsoft Bing conversational searches daily. Leveraging the Oracle Interconnect for Microsoft Azure, Microsoft is able to use managed services like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to orchestrate OCI Compute at massive scale to support increasing demand for Bing conversational search.

Week of 6th November, 2023

The report evaluated Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offerings in this area, including OCI Dedicated Region, Oracle Alloy, Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer, and Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer. See this Press Release for details and download a complimentary copy of 2023 Gartner® “Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure” here.

Global Active Tables, an active/active table replication feature across cloud regions for local read and write performance of globally distributed applications, is now available. Global Active Tables provide businesses with data synchronization and built-in conflict resolution of business application data even when data is written simultaneously to any participating regional table replica.

In this blog post, we showcase how to create advanced logic in your Terraform code using Oracle Resource Manager stacks. Using these tools provides a powerful way to automate complex stack deployments for your end users through a simple point-and-click interface.

ML applications implemented with PyTorch distributed data parallel (DDP) model and CUDA support can run on a single GPU, on multiple GPUs from single node, and on multiple GPUs from multiple nodes. In this blog, we show how easy and versatile it is to use the preinstalled SLURM to run PyTorch DDP jobs on OCI GPU instances, and how to run these jobs using Miniconda environment, Docker Containers and Nvidia Pyxis.

IBM Sterling Order Management is an industry-leading order management platform that provides centralized, near-real-time visibility across inventory, order, and delivery status to help deliver an extraordinary consumer experience. By migrating IBM Sterling Order Management to OCI, our customers have improved their infrastructure strategy to bring resiliency to their commerce core, meet peak demand, and scale out when necessary.

As more organizations run production-grade containerized workloads using Kubernetes, Day 2 challenges of ensuring application protection for Kubernetes clusters arise. Kasten by Veeam, a cloud native data management platform, now supports OKE clusters to backup and restore to further protect your data and mitigate against the risks of disaster for your Kubernetes application workloads on OKE.

 

Week of 30th October, 2023 

With effortless multi-GPU and multinode fine-tuning with Llama2, the OCI Data Science service makes it easy to harness the potential of large open language models. Leveraging the intuitive Oracle Accelerated Data Science Library, fine-tuning and deployment becomes seamless, all powered by the high-performance, scalable GPUs on OCI.

On OCI we’ve made it easy to monitor and observe your ARM server, databases, and apps together from a single pane of glass using OCI Observability and Management (O&M). Read how to create an APM domain, deploy APM Java agent on Apache Tomcat, configure application monitors, and more. 

Are you trying to decide which cloud platform is best for your infrastructure? Hands-on workshops provide the perfect platform for you to explore how to accelerate your cloud transformation journey and modernize your IT infrastructure. With OCI LiveLabs, you can conduct workshops at little to no cost using OCI’s free tier in our public regions to gain practical knowledge on cloud platform features and capabilities. 

Week of 23rd October, 2023

Remote Dictionary Server, or Redis, is an open source, in-memory data store that offers a wide range of data structures, including strings, hashes, lists, sets, and sorted sets. It’s often used as a caching layer to improve the performance of applications and a data store for real-time applications requiring millisecond latencies. We're excited to announce that our OCI Cache with Redis service is now generally available in all OCI regions.

We’re pleased to announce the general availability of a simplified user experience, along with scalability, availability, and performance improvements to the OCI Network Firewall service in all commercial regions. These significant enhancements aim to assist customers in effectively safeguarding their OCI and on-premises infrastructure.

OCI Vision service performs deep learning-based image analysis at scale. The new pretrained model, Face Detection, does not require any data science experience, allowing developers to easily build image recognition and text recognition into their applications.

OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral, open source observability framework for instrumenting, generating, collecting, and exporting telemetry data, such as traces, metrics, and logs. In this blog, learn about the core concepts and critical components of OTel, as well as the benefits of pairing it with OCI APM for visibility into the performance of your applications and the ability to diagnose issues quickly to deliver a consistent level of service.

Week of 16th October, 2023 

OCI Object Storage service just launched dedicated endpoints, which provide secure access to Object Storage buckets with customer tenancy-specific endpoints. This feature can help prevent cross site scripting attacks from affecting the OCI Object Storage service and its users.

New features for OCI flow logs are now available in all commercial regions, offering a simplified user experience, granular filtering options, and targeted enablement. Learn about common use cases, benefits, and how to get started configuring two new component--capture filters and targeted enablement points--to help ensure that valuable information doesn’t get lost in the overwhelming clutter.

With the recently launched Multiple VM on Exadata Cloud Infrastructure on OCI, you can now run both Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure and Exadata Database Service Dedicated on the same Exadata Cloud Infrastructure. With both databases on the same infrastructure, you can maximize your investment, have more flexibility for migrating databases to the cloud, and more easily modernize your applications.

Oracle Data Safe service now delivers essential security services for Oracle databases running in Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). With the addition of RDS support, Data Safe can help secure all Oracle Database deployments in OCI, Oracle Cloud@Customer, third-party clouds like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), and on-premises.

OCI services emit events, and in order to receive a notification when it finds a matching event, you must create a rule and specify an action. In this post, we'll teach you how to configure email notifications for events and improve the efficiency of your operation teams. 

Are you considering an Oracle Database migration to Autonomous Database? What are the technical considerations? Which databases should you move first? How do you assess the effort required? Great news! Oracle provides free diagnostic tools that evaluate your overall database estate, help you prioritize databases to migrate, and ensure technical compatibility.

Week of 9th October, 2023 

The OCI Vault service stores and manages encryption keys used to protect your data in OCI. Today, you can use OCI External Key Management Service (KMS) to encrypt data in OCI using encryption keys that are managed in a third-party key management system, hosted outside OCI. Customers who have regulatory needs to store encryption keys on premises or outside OCI can now do so while migrating their applications to OCI

To continue our commitment to making OCI more accessible and developer-friendly, we are excited to share the newest addition to the OCI command-line interface (CLI), support for the Microsoft Software Installer (MSI) Installer. The newest feature means that you can now install OCI CLI using a native installation mechanism familiar to most Windows users. 

With the new OCI self-paced labs subscription, you no longer need to create a Free Tier account or rely on your existing OCI account for hands-on practice in a real cloud environment. This subscription offers you the flexibility of choosing between monthly or annual plans, allowing you to concentrate on the hands-on exercises without the need to adjust account settings or experience unexpected costs.

Full Stack DR helps you because it only takes one person to recover an application, and that one person can execute recovery for many completely different business systems at the same time if needed. Check out this blog to learn about how one OCI customer reduced their tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone steps, enabling them to recover in a shorter amount of time. 

One of our key objectives for OCI Identity and Access Management (IAM) is to enable a secure and seamless access experience for our end users across their enterprise. We recently updated our Google Cloud integration, enabling OCI IAM to manage access for Google's suite of productivity and collaboration tools, called Google Workspace.

Week of 2nd October, 2023 

We’re excited to announce the opening of the Oracle Cloud Monterrey Region in partnership with Teléfonos de México (TELMEX-Triara). Oracle is the first hyperscaler to have two cloud regions in the country to broaden access and provide greater resiliency. Part of Oracle’s distributed cloud strategy, the new region is Oracle’s 46th worldwide and will offer Oracle Cloud’s full capabilities, including more than 100 OCI services and cloud applications.

Select AI makes it easier to interact with your Oracle Autonomous Database data by allowing you to use natural language queries instead of writing SQL. This method serves as a productivity tool for SQL and application developers. It can even enable nontechnical users to access their data using plain English. Check out the details in the linked blog.

The NVIDIA H100 GPU provides up to nine-times faster AI training, 30-times higher acceleration for AI inferencing, and 7-times higher performance for HPC applications compared to the previous-generation NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPU. Check out the linked blog for details on the BM.GPU.H100.8 Compute instance powered by NVIDIA H100 GPUs, available today.

As the next step on our journey to bring Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services closer, we’ve launched a new experience for Oracle Fusion Applications Environment Management that simplifies and unifies the lifecycle and administrative experience for cloud infrastructure and applications services, empowering customers to perform administrative tasks themselves in OCI without having to engage Oracle support. Check out this blog for details!

To achieve cloud security operational excellence, continuously monitoring and improving the security posture of your OCI tenancy and adopting essential cyber hygiene practices are crucial. For those navigating the dynamic cloud security landscape without a dedicated security information and event management (SIEM) system, security fundamentals dashboards provide a great starting point to build and maintain strong security observability and governance around your OCI cloud resources. Check out this blog to get started!

Migration projects often struggle to discover all the virtual machines (VMs) in the current environment. Wouldn’t it be great to have an automated way to find all your VMs and keep the list updated to ensure nothing gets missed during the migration process? The Oracle Cloud Migrations service from OCI is designed to provide you with a framework to discover your current environment, create an inventory of the assets, and offer transparency in pricing.

Database consolidation has been a prevalent strategy among enterprises to reduce operational and infrastructure costs. While various approaches exist, a native solution under the Autonomous Database umbrella hasn’t achieved similar benefits for cost savings. Elastic resource pools can be an invaluable tool for organizations looking to enhance their cost-effectiveness as they move hundreds or thousands of databases to Autonomous Database in OCI.

The rapid evolution of deep learning has brought about an insatiable demand for computing power. While GPU compute capabilities have dramatically increased, memory systems haven’t kept pace. This growing imbalance, known as the memory wall, has become a key bottleneck in training ever-larger deep learning models. Check out this blog to learn about the growing importance of memory bandwidth and caching,and how Oracle’s RDMA cluster network addresses the memory bottleneck issue.

GPUs are the primary processors used to train AI models. However, when deploying the inferences at scale, you want to optimize your computing resources by rightsizing your compute costs. For complex models, GPUs might not be the most cost-effective solution. See how using lower-power and more cost-effective CPUs in conjunction with a highly optimized ML platform, such as OCI A1 compute with Wallaroo.AI Enterprise Edition ML production platform, can provide a better alternative.

Week of 25th September, 2023

With so many announcements coming out of CloudWorld, we have a dedicated page to make it convenient for you to stay up to date with the latest and greatest news! 

We’re significantly expanding our partnership with Microsoft to launch a new service called Oracle Database@Azure! With this service, Microsoft and Oracle will deliver the same Oracle database services running on OCI in Microsoft Azure datacenters, designed to offer high levels of performance, scale, security, and availability. 

Java 21 is officially here! Much of the new functionality in Java 21 applies to four major platform initiatives; improving developer productivity, reimagining threading, bridging Java, and augmenting the Java object model with value objects. Other JEPs enhance Java’s core libraries and garbage collectors, while a few prepare outdated Java features for removal in future platform releases.

We're excited to announce the general availability of Graal Cloud Native 4 based on the recently launched Micronaut® framework 4! Graal Cloud Native (GCN) enables you to easily build portable cloud native Java microservices that start instantly, use fewer resources to reduce compute costs, and is fully supported by Oracle. Check out this blog to learn more about the notable changes. 

AI is essential in today's world, which is why we are happy to announce the OCI AI Foundations certification and course that is now available to you at no cost. This course provides beginner-level knowledge for AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Generative AI and Large Language Models – covering the fundamentals that anyone would need to understand the AI and Generative AI space.

Feature stores serve as centralized repositories for features meticulously crafted from raw data to be used in machine learning models. In this blog, we cover some of the concepts related to feature stores, such as entities, feature groups, datasets, creating datasets that are reusable in ML models, and how to get started on using the OCI Data Science features with examples. 

Week of 18th September, 2023

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) certified Rancher Government Solutions (RGS) products as the first container tools to meet the high standards for US government architectures. Running Rancher, which is available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, allows you to securely provision and orchestrate your cluster with many users across numerous projects, clouds, bare metal hardware, and edge deployments.

Creating a reliable solution for disaster recovery is imperative when protecting your business continuity. Oracle's Full Stack Disaster Recovery provides a complete recovery of the entire application stack, instead of recovering individual components one at a time, and it minimizes recovery time using automated workflows, which helps reduce the element of human errors. Check out this blog to learn how to get started.

Are you responsible for managing your tenancy security configurations, monitoring changes, or remediating any security findings? Oracle Cloud Guard can help you by examining resources in your OCI tenancy, detecting security weaknesses related to configuration and administrative activity, and enabling automated remediation. Learn more about how to configure it for your tenancy in this blog.

Week of 11th September, 2023

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Queue is a serverless asynchronous messaging service designed to handle large volumes of data with multiple concurrent producers and consumers of messages. To combat challenges that arise with multiple producers and consumers, channels can be used to improve message processing fairness, specify message selection, and enable request-response patterns.

You may now assign IPv6 addresses to VNICs attached to your Compute instance during launch.  Assigned IP addresses will be available to access the instance immediately after launch. See the IPv6 addresses documentation for more details.

Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure extends OCI services to the edge in transportable form factors with core cloud services designed as an extension of a customer’s OCI tenancy to distribute workloads in remote locations. UK customers can now leverage Oracle Roving Edge Infrastructure to process data faster and closer to their users and at the points of data ingestion to generate timely insights from their data.

The OCI Document Understanding service allows you to perform sophisticated data extraction from documents at scale to facilitate search, classification, analysis and integration with business processes without any data science background. The latest features in limited availability support expanded document formats, additional languages, integration with Oracle Process Automation and more. 

Passkeys are discoverable credentials that are compliant with the FIDO2 industry standard developed by the FIDO Alliance. A supported feature of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Identity and Access Management (OCI IAM), passkeys provide a form of passwordless authentication creating a simpler and more secure sign-in experience for you.

Week of 4th September, 2023

IPSec over FastConnect lets you set up Site-to-Site VPN with secure IPSec tunnels on your FastConnect virtual circuits, providing added security to your private connection. These IPSec tunnels protect network-to-network connections on Layer 3. Check out our documentation to learn about using encryption with FastConnect for better network security.

You can now create event stream processing pipelines using OCI GoldenGate Stream Analytics. Pipelines can process input from GoldenGate Extracts, Kafka, or other sources, and join, transform, aggregate, or filter events using patterns and machine learning models. You can then output results to event streams, data stores, or operational dashboards. Stream Analytics is currently in Limited Availability in specific regions.

Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC) is a single and complete platform that empowers your entire organization to ask any question of any data—across any environment, on any device. It fits into your ecosystem, enabling analysis in the cloud while also providing easy access to any data source. If you're looking for a quick guide on how to set up your OAC environment, this blog is for you!

Oracle SQL Developer is a free, integrated development environment that simplifies the development and management of Oracle Database in both traditional and cloud deployments. At some point, you might need to access Microsoft SQL Server from your OCI Windows VM or your own desktop. You can utilize SQL Developer on OCI in the realm of Microsoft SQL Server databases for tasks such as connecting to Microsoft SQL Server databases, writing and running SQL queries, and migrating Microsoft SQL Server tables to an Oracle database with a few keystrokes. 

Did you know that OCI provides a comprehensive set of tools for you to easily see, measure, and diagnose your virtual network, as well as manage your connectivity requirements on a day-to-day basis? Learn how to get started, troubleshoot, and set up proactive measures in this blog. 

OCI Operations Insights, (OPSI), part of the Oracle Cloud Observability and Management platform, has new features that help gather, analyze and plan for enterprise growth. In essence, it helps perform data-driven capacity planning and performance management thereby reducing enterprise capital expenditure and improving applications throughput. Check out this blog for a highlight of key additions.

Week of 28th August, 2023

On August 15th, Oracle announced that the U.S. Intelligence Community has authorized Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to host Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) missions. With this new authorization, the Intelligence Community gains access to more than 50 Oracle Cloud services on Top Secret networks, with more services planned to become available in a continuous accreditation process. See this announcement for details.

VMware Cloud Universal offers customers a flexible way to apply the value of their VMware perpetual licenses as they migrate on-premises workloads to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution on OCI. Oracle Cloud VMware Solution will be available for purchase through the VMware Cloud Universal program with other VMware Cross-Cloud services. With the new summer release, we aim to simplify your cloud experience by including new features for vSphere 8, expanded block storage support, enhanced flexibility for compute shapes, and more!

Like other hyperscalers, Oracle Cloud VMware Solution doesn’t support vSphere with the Tanzu deployment option. vSphere with Tanzu is supported usually for on-premises customers, and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Multicloud (TKGm) is supported on hyperscalers and public clouds. Check out this blog to see how running your modern applications using TKGm with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution gives you the same high availability and flexibility you may be accustomed to on-premises.

Backup-based disaster recovery uses backups to start a peer database at the time of switchover or failover. With the most recent updates to Autonomous Database, you can now configure a backup-based disaster recovery database in addition to Autonomous Data Guard, which enables you to have a lower cost and higher recovery time objective (RTO) disaster recovery option.

The domain name system (DNS) architecture deployed in OCI is a hybrid DNS workload that follows a hub-and-spoke topology. While this gives operational effectiveness and eases management, the default dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) option and forwarding rules in VCN resolver could lead to failure scenarios. This blog provides guidance on developing high availability and resilience of the private DNS with the help of DHCP options in a VCN.

The free certification program has been extended through September 30th. Take advantage of this opportunity to prove and showcase your OCI and Cloud Applications knowledge!

How are Formula One (F1) racing and financial services institutions similar? They both involve the collection, analysis, and management of large amounts of data to make informed decisions. In this post, we look at a real F1 use case running in OCI and share a solution for trading risk analysis that we developed for one of our financial services customers.   

Week of 21st August, 2023

If you want to stay notified about OCI File Storage metrics by receiving proactive notifications to prevent any potential issues, this blog is for you! Learn how you can create basic or advanced monitoring notifications, including custom alarm messages, so that you can monitor important KPIs in your file system. 

Kerberos provides a secure way to authenticate users and services, allowing them to communicate over networks while helping ensure their identities. If you’ve ever wanted to enhance the security of your data processing and analysis capabilities using Alteryx and Big Data Service, this blog is for you.

Are you experiencing performance issues when reading large Optimized Row Columnar (ORC) files from cloud storage services like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Data Flow and OCI Big Data Service? In this blog, we share how we tackled an ORC file reading performance issue and achieved significant improvements by tuning specific Spark configurations. 

By providing a comprehensive certification process that ensures quality, adherence to 3GPP standards, interoperability, and readiness for the 5G revolution, Oracle empowers NEPs to make their offerings readily available on OCI, allowing CSPs to build powerful and flexible networks.

OCI offers government, defense, and intelligence agencies a hyperscale cloud that can host highly sensitive and classified workloads. This blog post explores how government customers can utilize OCI to run their mission-critical workloads at a superior price performance compared to other cloud providers. 

Apache Cassandra is an open source NoSQL distributed database that manages a large volume of data with great ease, scalability, and is trusted by thousands of companies, including Apple, eBay, and Netflix. Check out this benchmark to see how running Cassandra on Ampere Altra processors can yield higher throughput, lower latencies, and lower TCO.

Week of 14th August, 2023

Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer is a fully managed, rack-scale infrastructure platform that lets you run enterprise and cloud native workloads on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Compute. It is built, installed, owned, and remotely managed by Oracle, so you can focus scarce IT resources on growing your business and improving operating efficiency.

To meet rapidly growing global demand from public sector organizations, Oracle announced the new Oracle Cloud for Australian Government and Defense in Canberra. Offering over 100 services, the new region is a complete and highly secure hyperscale cloud platform that allows customers to build and run applications. See the latest documentation for details.

OCI Connector Hub service logs provide you with greater visibility into connector functioning. These service logs can help you to troubleshoot connector issues easily so that you can focus on what matters most: transferring data from sources to targets within and beyond OCI in an effortless and seamless way. 

When thinking of autoscaling for cloud infrastructure, two major components come to mind: Compute instances and database instances. Scaling Compute instances is comparatively easy, but for database instances like Autonomous Data Warehouse or Autonomous Transaction Processing, the setup can be more involved. See how you can leverage OCI cloud native technologies to scale both down and up operations based on user session count, and apply the same logic to other query parameters and metrics.

As the demand for media content continues to soar, businesses in the media and entertainment industry are increasingly turning to cloud platforms to store, process, and distribute their content efficiently. Understanding the pricing models and cost factors involved can be challenging so we conducted a comprehensive price comparison of media services across the major cloud providers so you don't have to. 

Agility with scale in the cloud is a growing need across many industries as organizations move scale-out workloads with larger datasets to get new and valuable insights. TIBCO DataSynapse GridServer allows for provisioning and managing large cloud-based deployments up to millions of CPUs within minutes with OCI. This reference architecture shows the deployment of GridServer on OCI for elastic compute workloads in a financial services context.

Transcribing physicians’ audio recordings of diagnostic information and treatment plans to electronic healthcare records (EHR) quickly and accurately is a common challenge in healthcare, especially in large volumes. Oracle and NVIDIA tackled this challenge with an AI-powered medical transcription implementation utilizing NVIDIA Riva speech and translation AI software tool kit on OCI Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE).

Week of 7th August, 2023

Oracle Exadata Database Service customers can now update their Grid Infrastructure and Database deployments as a fleet in a controlled manner by grouping and scheduling updates according to their environment, at no extra cost.

SQL performance of cloud and on-premises databases can now be managed and the likelihood of unexpected regression reduced with the new SQL Plan Management (SPM) feature in OCI Database Management service (DBM). SPM allows database users to maintain stable, optimal performance for a set of SQL statements, and SPM functionality can be managed and configured to improve the overall performance of database environments over time.

If you're wondering how to move your Kubernetes workloads to OCI from other environments, we have the answer. Velero is an open source tool to safely back up and restore, perform disaster recovery, and migrate Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes. This blog and tutorial guides you through the process!

A recent enhancement to the full pushdown capability in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Data Integration data pipelines allows hundreds of jobs to run concurrently instead of dozens previously. The increased throughput translates to reduced processing time and cost savings. Learn how it works and how you can take advantage of it in your own ETL flows.

Data migration across tenancies is a core part of data protection and operations efficiency strategies for cloud application owners and storage admins. It's a complex process and requires careful planning to ensure that data is migrated safely, securely, with no data loss and minimal downtime. Learn the process and options available for your migration plans through this solution playbook.

Oracle Access Governance is a cloud native identity governance and administration (IGA) solution as a service. Organizations can manage identities and govern access across multiple on-premises systems, cloud platforms, and applications. Built from the ground-up for ease of use and simplified user experience, it enables business owners, security owners, and access approvers to perform their tasks efficiently.

Oracle and Netaxis are excited to announce session border controller as a service (SBCaaS) from Netaxis on OCI, powered by Oracle’s own SBCs complemented by Netaxis’ fully automated and intelligent routing layer. With a single click, communications service providers (CSPs) can easily launch the fully automated, highly available service to deliver secure, high-quality voice and video across real time communication networks.

Week of 31st July, 2023

OCI Full Stack Disaster Recovery (Full Stack DR) provides fully automated disaster recovery orchestration across layers of cloud resources, including compute, database, and application recovery between OCI regions. We are introducing two new features when moving virtual machines from Primary to standby DR protection group: Capacity Reservation Integration and Private IP address and hostname Assignment. 

Oracle Enterprise Landing Zone (OELZ) enables you to rapidly onboard workloads to OCI using industry and Oracle best practice guidance. We are excited to share two new templates, Workload expansion and Exadata expansion, designed to empower your organization with more flexibility, agility, improved automation, expanded security, and simplified migration.

Organizations that use Kerberos and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for identity management often want to integrate their storage systems for secure centralized authentication and authorization. This blog post introduces Kerberos and LDAP integration with OCI File Storage (FSS), providing an overview of the features and their general configuration requirements.

OCI delivers a highly scalable cluster that supports accelerated computing for many different workloads and applications by investing in a dedicated RoCE network with an optimized implementation of DC-QCN, advanced ConnectX NICs, and customized congestion control profiles. Learn more about how OCI can improve your cluster network latency and increase your workload performance here. 

Wondering how MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse achieves industry-leading performance at such a high scale? In this post, hear about some of its unique engineering innovations, from massively partitioned architecture to novel lower-level optimizations.

When you’re moving to a multicloud environment and use queries that return a large result set, you can tune the fetch size of the queries to optimize the performance. In this blog, learn how to influence the fetch size in different ways depending on the tools and connectivity you use. 

For Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) customers, an OCI subscription includes licenses and full support for all Oracle Java SE and Oracle GraalVM versions at no extra cost. We also make it easy for developers to get started with an Oracle Linux Cloud Developer image that contains a comprehensive cloud development environment that includes various popular development languages such as Java with Oracle JDK or Oracle GraalVM, Python, Ruby, and more.

Week of 24th July, 2023

OCI Compute E5 Standard bare metal and virtual machine (VM) instances based on 4th generation AMD EPYC Processors™ is now generally available! Compared to the previous generation E5 instances support a greater number of OCPUs, better performance per core, and greater memory bandwidth. Check out the blog for all the details!

Stack Monitoring is an OCI service that supports the discovery and monitoring of applications such as PeopleSoft and its underlying tech stack components including Oracle Database and WebLogic Servers. The latest release supports Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and OCI Tags to ease monitoring of components and their relationships in large complex architectures.

Data flows allow users to perform lightweight ETL processes in their OAC environment. Sharing these data flows presents several advantages including increased collaboration, reusability, improved training and onboarding, dataset transparency, and more. In this short blog, learn how to share your data preparation workflows in OAC with members of your organization. 

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) monitors end-users’ experience and application performance by tracing and correlating transactions through multiple components and application logic distributed across various clients, third-party services, and backend tiers, in the Cloud or on-premises. Check out this blog for the latest enhancements in Synthetics, one of APM’s key capabilities that help developers and operators prevent issues before users are impacted.

Are your developers bogged down with operational requirements for data management or complex data integrations? In this blog, learn about how keeping data in one single platform reduces developer challenges without sacrificing agility.

Through an independent third-party audit report, OCI has achieved an OSPAR (Objectives and Procedures for Outsourced Service Providers) attestation for the Singapore data region and 107 of OCI services to address the potential risks of outsourcing. Banks in Singapore can run their applications on OCI with confidence knowing that OCI meets OSPAR security requirements and service controls.

Week of 17th July, 2023

OCI IAM with identity domains is now available in Oracle US Gov and Defense cloud regions, with support for FedRAMP high and DoD impact level 5. This expansion provides a testament to the strong security architecture and built-in security of the OCI IAM service for all of our customers. 

How do you extend a connection from on-premises to a remote OCI region when your VCN is connected to on-premises via Site-to-Site VPN and another OCI region via Remote Peering Connection? This blog shows you how!

Path MTU Discovery (PMTUD) must be enabled when using Oracle Database service for Azure connected to a hub-and-spoke network. However, this setup might not be feasible for a number of reasons. Check out this blog for various options to work around this obstacle.

AI is fundamentally changing the way we interact with the world, but many vendors are trying to move quickly in this space without addressing the specific, end-to-end needs of enterprise customers. Oracle's approach is built for enterprises by spanning considerations such as cloud-to-on-premises data, deployment to business apps, security, data privacy, and now the best LLMs.

Are you interested in deploying a hybrid cloud architecture that combines OCI with a colocation provider? This Oracle Solution Center case study showcases a stable, performant, and scalable solution using Exadata on the Equinix Cloud Adjacent platform with application components in OCI.

Week of 3rd July, 2023

OCI Secure Desktops is an exciting new cloud-native service that allows you to deploy Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) easily and quickly, right out of your OCI tenancy. Secure Desktops service can also enhance the security of your data, enabling developers to work with your most sensitive intellectual property, or where your support personnel can securely check their customers’ data.

The eco-friendly and energy-efficient architecture of Arm technology, and specifically Ampere processors, has made it popular in hyperscale cloud data centers. We are excited to announce that Oracle Database 19c Enterprise Edition, the current long-term support release of Oracle Database, is now certified and available on the popular Arm architecture for both cloud and on-premises deployments. 

The OCI Document Understanding service allows you to perform sophisticated document extraction at scale without any data science background. Two new features are now available with the latest release, custom key value extraction and custom document classification. With these additions, you can easily tailor key value extraction and classification models to your industry or use-case specific documents. 

In this fourth post of our multipart series on data sovereignty in the cloud, learn about the operations and support roles at OCI and how they compare between the different cloud offerings.

LLMs require substantial amounts of memory to store the numerous parameters and intermediate results during inference. Managing memory usage efficiently can be daunting particularly when dealing with limited resources or large input sizes. In this example with GPT-2, see how NVIDIA Triton Inference Server with OCI Data Science Model Deployment service automatically detects GPUs and optimizes GPU infrastructure management through built-in support for sharding and ensembles - building blocks of LLMs.

Looking for earlier updates?

Week of 26th June, 2023 

In order to address data residency and sovereignty requirements in the European Union and deliver the services, value, and service level agreements (SLAs) offered by OCI, we launched Oracle EU Sovereign Cloud. This independently managed cloud serves both commercial and government customers that use cloud computing to host their applications and sensitive data in the EU.

The latest generation of the world’s best on-premises cloud database platform is now available! Exadata Cloud@Customer X10M now offers AMD's 4th Generation EPYC™ processors, with 3 times as many database server cores as the previous generation X9M platform to provide extreme scalability, performance, and economics for dramatically improved price-performance.

To improve the developer experience within OCI, we are excited to announce Open in Code Editor, which simplifies the setup process of your repository. With a click of a button, you can clone a repository and open it directly in OCI Code Editor, eliminating the need for tedious setup steps and giving you more time to focus on writing exceptional code. 

If you are a cloud native application and microservice developer, a cloud solution architect, or wanting to learn more about leveraging OCI for cloud native application solutions, check out this blog for details on the significantly enhanced training and certification exam.

This updated course and certification is designed specifically for Data Scientists, ML and AI Engineers and solution architects, or anyone who wants to learn how to use OCI Data Science and AI services to acquire-explore-visualize-prepare data, build-train-evaluate-deploy models and automate ML pipelines.

This updated course and certification caters to Cloud Professionals looking to develop a deeper understanding of each OCI O&M service and become proficient in building a complete observability solution with a unified view across the entire infrastructure, applications, and software stack.

Did you know that OCI offers many of the same services as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud for less? No? In this blog, learn about how OCI was designed to be the leader in price performance for cloud infrastructure technology. 

Week of 19th June, 2023

Following up on last October's announcement, MySQL HeatWave expands to include HeatWave Lakehouse, letting organizations process and query hundreds of terabytes of data residing in Object Storage. With MySQL HeatWave Lakehouse, MySQL HeatWave provides one service for transaction processing, analytics across data warehouses and data lakes, and machine learning - without ETL across cloud services.

A new Oracle Linux Cloud Developer image is now available on OCI! With a few clicks, this image lets you quickly and easily launch a comprehensive development environment that allows you to deploy an Oracle Linux instance with the software and tools you need to jumpstart your projects, increase productivity, and reduce time-consuming steps.  

Graal Cloud Native (GCN) is a curated set of open source Micronaut® framework modules that simplify multicloud application development and are designed from the ground up to be compiled ahead-of-time with GraalVM Native Image. GCN v3.8.5 enables you to easily build portable cloud native Java microservices that start instantly and use fewer resources to reduce compute costs.

Oracle is making Oracle GraalVM for JDK 17, Oracle GraalVM for JDK 20, and subsequent releases available for free! Developers and organizations can now easily download, use, share, and redistribute Oracle GraalVM without needing a click-through license agreement and Oracle will continue to provide GPL-licensed GraalVM Community Edition releases under the same terms as Oracle builds of OpenJDK. 

The combination of Oracle’s comprehensive portfolio of cloud applications, unrivaled data management expertise, and best-in-class AI infrastructure with Cohere’s state-of-the-art large language models will help organizations automate end-to-end business processes, improve decision-making, and enhance customer experiences.

Compute E5 instances will offer more CPU cores, better performance per core, better memory bandwidth, and higher storage capacity than previous iterations with customizable options including Standard, HPC and Dense-IO instances. General availability is planned during the second half of 2023.

Using Oracle Database Service for Azure connected to a hub-and-spoke network requires extra setup in Azure to work properly and for all network traffic to flow correctly. Otherwise you can experience hanging connections between Azure and OCI resources across the multicloud network link. Learn how to set up your architecture optimally through this blog.

Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and Oracle all offer compute instances for AI Infrastructure. In this blog, learn about what sets OCI apart to offer the best price-performance for building and training AI models.

OCI provides multiple ways to view current service limits, set quotas for resources, and increase limits. Check out the video we created to help you understand the capacity management tools available to you, how to use them, and how to plan ahead to ensure billing predictability and service continuity. 

Week of 12th June, 2023

As developers we understand the challenges in building and deploying applications on cloud platforms. You often spend significant time configuring your development environment to build cloud applications and switching between multiple tools and environments. The OCI Toolkit solves these challenges by simplifying how you work and interact with OCI resources right from VS Code.

OCI preemptible instances allow you to run periodic and short-term workloads at a reduced cost, the trade-off being that OCI can reclaim the instances at any time. With support for this instance type, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) can now run preemptible worker nodes on your cluster for fault-tolerant containerized workloads.

Test out the new OCI GPU shapes with 3D graphics rendering, animation, and ray-tracing capabilities with us! We will walk you through simple rendering and animation tasks using Blender classroom samples, summarize the performance findings, and showcase the GPU-based rendering in relation to CPU-based rendering.

Oracle Autonomous Database (ADB) offers powerful capabilities for developing applications with high-performance ACID transactions and robust security, including native support for JSON data. If you're a MongoDB developer, you can harness these capabilities within Autonomous Databases using the Oracle Database API for MongoDB.

Integrating on-premises local domain name systems (DNS) with private cloud DNS is important for ensuring reliable connectivity between the two network environments. Learn how to utilize the DNS endpoint provided by OCI, enabling devices in the corporate LAN to reach resources in the cloud environment and vice versa, making service management and integration quick and easy. 

Running your applications on a Kubernetes cluster with OKE virtual nodes saves you from managing the capacity of the worker node, their maintenance, patching, and repairs. In this blog post, we detail the three key steps to get started with OKE virtual nodes and recommended best practices on optimal use.

Week of 5th June, 2023

Oracle University is thrilled to offer you an exclusive opportunity to prove your expertise with free certification exams for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Cloud Applications Business Process through August 31st, 2023. Earn badges and prizes as you attain in-demand skills across OCI, multicloud, AI, Machine Learning, data management, and Cloud Applications.

Policy-based snapshots for OCI File Storage services are now a fully managed feature that allows you to manage the entire lifecycle of file system snapshots. With the new feature, you can define the frequency and retention period of the file system snapshot, as well as configure the snapshot policies to match the data retention policies of your business to achieve compliance. 

In the world of Kubernetes, an ingress controller allows incoming traffic to be routed to the appropriate service within a cluster. With our new native ingress controller, you can now easily and efficiently manage your ingress resources directly within Kubernetes, without relying on any external controllers. 

Have you ever needed help creating an instance, a virtual cloud network (VCN), or moving a load balancer between compartments? With the release of our new help panels, you will be able to find the steps to solve these problems easily without having to leave the Oracle Cloud Console. The new panels are curated with links based on where you are in the console in order to help you accomplish your goals. 

The ability to run different kinds of workloads is a big appeal of Kubernetes, but we’ve found that getting Windows workloads up and running can be challenging. We made this process easier using our Cluster API for OCI. Check out this blog on how you too can provision worker nodes to run either Windows or Linux, even in the same cluster.

In this blog, learn about how OCI's two-region design strategy, combined with our out-of-the-box tools and features for developers, can offer you a superior balance of high availability and disaster recovery. Our two-region strategy makes it easy for you to implement your resiliency requirements for your mission-critical workloads.

Week of 29th May, 2023

By delegating a DNS zone, organizations can exercise control over their own DNS infrastructure and make changes to their DNS records independently, without relying on the parent domain’s DNS administrators, enhancing flexibility and agility. Check out this blog for a quick example with OCI public DNS service and a public DNS registrar.

You may not need high-availability in every SQL Server deployment, although performance, accessibility, and cost are likely always a consideration. Read-scale availability groups help scale the application by offloading read-based workloads to multiple secondary nodes without the need for a traditional cluster setup. With OCI, you can realize an optimization of cost plus performance by simply deploying SQL Server on Windows-based compute instances.

Choosing between single- and multi-availability domain deployment with OCVS is usually driven by availability requirements. In this blog post, take a deeper look at each deployment option and review their respective requirements, considerations, limitations, and benefits.

Cloud resilience plays a critical role in ensuring operational continuity and helping organizations achieve their business goals. By adopting the right strategy, resilience can rebuild trust and reduce costs. In this blog, learn about OCI resilience patterns designed to ensure that applications and services are highly available, scalable, fault-tolerant, and recover swiftly from failures or any form of disruption.

Week of 22nd May, 2023

As an increasing number of enterprises adopt cloud infrastructure and services, it can become more challenging to manage policies and entitlements to infrastructure components, platform services, and application access. We are pleased to announce a solution to this challenge with Oracle Access Governance, a cloud native service that supports policy reviews across multiple OCI tenancies, helps organizations meet compliance requirements, and protects OCI infrastructure assets. 

You can now add a HeatWave cluster to a high availability DB system. This ensures high availability with zero data loss to your OLTP workload while getting query acceleration for your complex/OLAP workload with HeatWave.

Today’s enterprises must avoid downtime for their business application services at all costs. Monitoring becomes pivotal to delivering these goals, making the availability of the management tools critical. This blog illustrates a reference deployment architecture for highly available Management Gateways to ensure that monitoring agents continue to collect and deliver full stack monitoring payload to OCI Observability and Management (O&M) services.

Widely considered to be the next iteration of the Internet, Web3 consists of open source, decentralized applications powered by blockchain technology. In this blog, learn how OCI's high performance, low cost, globally consistent pricing, scalability, decentralization, and hands-on support can save money and increase performance for these applications.

When it comes to the payment industry, the solutions they provide need high performance and enough elasticity to accommodate demand spikes, and for everything to happen in real-time. In this blog, learn about important technical considerations for a successful payment solution deployment, and why OCI should be the platform of your choice. 

Recently, Microsoft Azure published several reference architectures to assist multicloud customers using the Oracle Interconnect for Azure to enable network connectivity using different supported and validated scenarios. Check out this blog for an overview of the networking scenarios to successfully utilize the OCI-Azure Interconnect and achieve better performance in both clouds. 

In addition to Autonomous Database, you can now use OCI IAM or Azure AD user credentials to access databases in Base Database service (BaseDB), Exadata Database service, and Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer. Check out this blog on how it works and how to get started.

Generative AI models have dazzled us with their ability to summarize and answer questions, create software, and even write poetry. However, most organizations have yet to take advantage of them, due to the amount of knowledge and resources required to build a proprietary generative AI model, amongst other concerns. This blog breaks down the obstacles to adoption and explains why the MosaicML platform on OCI is the best solution for enterprises that want to operationalize generative AI.

Week of 15th May, 2023

Since the initial launch, you told us that while dense shapes deliver a lot of processing power, you also need support for small- and medium-sized workloads and greater agility. So we are excited to announce our Spring '23 release, which includes support for flexible Compute shapes with independent scaling of compute and storage, to provide a cost-effective path to the public cloud.

The Oracle Linux 8 STIG image is now available for launching Oracle Linux 8 enhanced security profile instances on OCI. The new release enables you to easily and quickly launch Oracle Linux instances that you can configure to match security standards and requirements set by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) of the US Department of Defense (DoD).

In this blog, we describe how you can easily implement a highly available and scalable machine learning model inferencing solution on OCI. It contains a reference architecture for an internal, private deployment of the model inference solution along with links to our GitHub repository so you can try it in your own OCI environment.

Role-based filters work by acting on application roles in Oracle Analytics Cloud (OAC). They are easy to use and you can create them with predefined or user-defined application roles, and can tailor them using simple or complex expressions. Check out this blog for the step-by-step!

Oracle sovereign cloud solutions ensure that you’re in control of your data and have the capabilities and features to mitigate the potential risk of unauthorized access, collection, use, or disclosure of data. In this first blog of a three-part series, learn how a strong security posture is a critical component of any sovereign cloud strategy, and about the appropriate access controls that need to be in place.

Oracle Banking Digital Experience (OBDX) is a financial services solution that provides a modern banking experience across multiple channels while integrating with existing systems for core banking. With options for on-premises, IaaS and PaaS deployments, which model is ideal for delivering a scalable reliable digital banking platform that offers the best customer experience? Read this blog to find out!

Oracle Database Service for Azure (ODSA) has reduced the size of the minimum private CIDR range requirement when provisioning a database service. This blog explains the new CIDR range requirement, how it is used within Oracle Database Service for Azure, and how to select the appropriate space based on the database service you’re provisioning.

Week of 8th May, 2023

Updating worker nodes in Kubernetes clusters can be time-consuming, requiring you to manually rotate nodes or develop your own solutions. That is why we are excited to announce the release of on-demand node cycling for OKE, a feature that enables you to easily perform node upgrades and update node pool properties, such as SSH keys, boot volume size, custom cloud-init scripts, and more.

Check out this blog to learn about the latest ehnancements to ADW such as Multicloud Data Warehouse, Autonomous Database Data Studio, Open Data Sharing and more!

As cyber-attacks get more and more sophisticated, traditional firewalls filtering just IP headers isn't enough. In this blog, learn how you can protect your workload against advanced attacks with the OCI Network Firewall to inspect TLS/SSL encrypted connections and then apply intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS and IPS) to your traffic flows.

  • Learn: OCI VM Live Migration 

Organizations need a cloud that can keep up with 24/7 customer demand while supporting continuous updates for security and operational reasons. To meet this demand, OCI has implemented a process that keeps enterprise workloads up and running even during routine maintenance events. Live Migration is now available to enterprises for all Standard compute shapes. Learn how Live Migration works and how it can improve your VM workload availability

While working with SQL Server databases we often encounter three scenarios: You need a read-only, standby copy of the database. You must move or migrate your database from one server to another with minimal downtime. Or, you need to configure a disaster recovery solution. In this blog, we discuss how one of the simplest features, log shipping, can address all three scenarios. 

Week of 1st May, 2023

As organizations increasingly distribute workloads across multiple clouds, the need for cloud architects who possess the skills and knowledge to design and manage multicloud environments is growing rapidly. Check out our one-stop learning platform to build those skills and earn a valuable credential to showcase your new domain expertise!

We are excited to announce significant enhancements to the container network interface (CNI) plugin for OKE, including improved network performance and support for service mesh products. In this blog, learn about enabling pod-to-pod communication and more of the benefits that come with the 2.0.0 update. 

As you probably know, database links are an established mechanism to allow other remote databases to access specific tables or views in your database that usually require a two-way interaction. With Cloud Links, a new functionality in Autonomous Database Shared, a data owner can register a table or view for remote access to a selected audience who can then access that data at any time. Sounds almost too cool to be true, learn how it works in the blog.

In many analytics use cases, spatial data brings the location dimension into the analysis, enhancing the insights you can extract from your dataset. In this blog, learn about the key elements of OAC maps to better understand how each component functions and how you can create and modify them to build a compelling geospatial visualization.

With Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, you can migrate existing on-premises VMware virtual machines (VMs) and immediately benefit from the elastic scale and performance of OCI, all while using the same VMware tools you know and love. With the certification of Dell Data Protection Suite with OCVS, you can reduce IT complexity further through common tools to protect your VMware workloads and data from any location.

Week of 24th April, 2023

OCI Cloud Shell is a free, web-based shell environment with a wealth of tools to manage your infrastructure and interact with various OCI services. But if you're new to Cloud Shell, what's the best way to learn? We’re excited to announce the release of the user tutorial for Cloud Shell so that you can get the most use out of it!

As a FastConnect partner, customers can fully provision their FastConnect virtual circuits with Megaport through an integrated workflow in the Oracle Cloud Console without needing to switch between multiple web portals. By adding support for Megaport Cloud Router (MCR), you can easily set up connections between OCI and other clouds!

Are you looking for a way to access OCI code repositories once or for a short time? Are you afraid of using your long-lived access tokens because of security concerns? Session token-based authentication for OCI DevOps Git Operations has the answer. This blog outlines the high-level steps with sample outputs to use session token-based authentication.

In a previous blog, you read about the benefits of Ampere Altra for analytics using Elasticsearch. Check out this blog to see how its low-power design and high performance can also benefit your Apache Spark big data workloads!

Oracle and Druid Software have announced the validation of a turnkey, 3GPP-compliant 5G network on OCI. Druid's Raemis core platform uses Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes and cloud-native tooling to provide enterprises and CSPs with an easy-to-deploy and reliable private network in a box with reliable end-to-end data connectivity and low-latency performance.

Week of 17th April, 2023 

This new plugin eases development and deployment of serverless OCI Data Flow Spark application on OCI. Say goodbye to the hassle of managing infrastructure and hello to a streamlined workflow that lets you create, test, and deploy your data pipeline, all in one powerful integrated environment.

Powered by four NVIDIA A10 Tensor Core GPUs, you can now deploy Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, which enables customers to run a VMware vSphere software-defined data center on OCI bare metal instances. Check out this blog to learn more about use cases and sign up for the beta program. 

  • Learn: OCI in Financial Services

We're excited to introduce a new blog series on cloud-enabled innovation in the financial services industry. To start, see how financial institutions leverage key OCI capabilities to support their loan origination, credit card fraud detection, and bank account opening and onboarding services.

Did you know that you can run Microsoft SQL Server on OCI? In this blog post, learn more about the different ways you can deploy MS SQL on OCI and its benefits, including Bring Your Own License (BYOL). 

In this second blog in a series on data residency in the cloud, learn what realms are and how OCI’s unique architecture simplifies and strengthens data residency and controls to help assure that your data remains in the physical and logical environments that you select.

Week of 10th April, 2023 

Cluster API clears the complexities of setting up, configuring, and managing Kubernetes clusters, enabling you to perform these tasks declaratively and programmatically across multiple cloud providers, on-premises, and edge infrastructure. By simplifying configuration and automating the process, you can reduce the risks of configuration drift and make it easier to monitor and manage your clusters consistently.

With thousands of users accessing multiple applications, getting a simple view of service entitlements and accesses can be challenging for a typical enterprise. This new reference architecture can help reduce security risks by deploying tools that reduce human error and provide insight into who has access to what areas and the risks they pose to the organization.

Did you know that OCI has an icon set that you can use in your Draw.io diagrams? Most discussions about cloud architecture warrant a detailed drawing that everyone can see, approve, improve, and use as documentation. In this blog, learn where you can download the OCI set and gain tips on how to best organize your drawings. 

Full Stack DR is Oracle’s first true disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) solution for OCI and is more than just a simple orchestration engine. It gives you the power and flexibility to implement disaster recovery for Oracle or non-Oracle applications in OCI the way you want, not the way we want. 

According to the 2022 S&P Global multicloud survey, more than 97% of companies have more than one cloud service provider. If you run your applications in one cloud, or ten, you need the ability to access all your resources by name. To learn more about OCI DNS zones, OCI private DNS, OCI DNA metrics, use cases for each and more, check out this blog. 

Running Java workloads with highest effectiveness in cloud environments means optimizing across a series of metrics including throughput, startup, latency, memory footprint, and packaging size. Watch this webcast to learn about the different trade-offs in the solution space that is offered by Oracle's GraalVM and Java technologies to find the best fit for your Java deployment.

Week of 3rd April, 2023 

Pre-built functions, a new capability of the OCI Functions service, are ready-to-use functions that you can configure to run common tasks or actions across OCI services without writing any code. Deployed and invoked as OCI Functions they are serverless, removing the need for you to manage any infrastructure. See this blog to get started, and this budgeting example for details. Also, check out this blog on how OCI Functions compares with AWS Lambda in cost and value.

In today’s fast-paced world, delivering high-quality media content to a global audience has become a critical aspect of many businesses. In this blog, we review how you can automate media processing with OCI Media Flow using OCI prebuilt functions in order to deliver a reliable and high-quality media experience to end-users.

Do you need access to compliance attestations to assist with compliance reporting for your OCI services? Check out this blog to learn how you can quickly and easily access these documents through the Oracle Cloud Console

Why should you care about dedicated infrastructure when everything works just fine in other clouds on infrastructure built with shared, commodity hardware? When is it better to live in a house than an apartment? In this blog, learn about which Autonomous Database infrastructure you should consider to meet the needs of your business. 

Week of 27th March, 2023 

Oracle has announced the limited availability of OCI bare metal Compute instances powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and NVIDIA networking. OCI bare metal instances provide consistent performance, ultra-low latency, isolation, and control. With high-performance local storage, high-performance computing (HPC) storage, cluster networking, and memory, bare metal instances can be part of an OCI Supercluster that can scale to 16,384 NVIDIA H100 GPUs.

  • Partner Solutions: Deliver high-performing, cost-effective inference services on OCI using NVIDIA Triton Inference Server

NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, part of the NVIDIA AI platform, is an open-source inference-serving software that helps standardize model deployment and execution and delivers fast and scalable AI in production. Learn how it can be used to gain performance in the OCI Vision service and serve ML models at scale.

Elasticsearch is a popular distributed, open search and analytics engine for all types of data, built on Apache Lucene. Should you consider running it on OCI's Ampere A1 compute? How do the benefits compare to running it on other compute types? Check out this blog written in collaboration with Ampere to find out!

The OCI Logging service is a single pane of glass for log management within a tenancy. In this blog, learn how to enable and access logging so that you or your administrators can gain valuable information about the usage of your OAC resources.

This blog written by Oracle's Cloud Engineering team reviews various architectural approaches and tradeoffs for multicloud logging integration. Get prescriptive guidance on implementing a working solution in your environment, leveraging real-world customer experiences.

How can APIs be applied to address specific industry problems? In this blog, we look at how the food and beverage industry continues to evolve and innovate using APIs to monitor, manage, protect, and perform value analysis, extending monetization. See how Oracle helps innovation in this and other industries on our new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure API product pages.

Week of 20th March, 2023 

The OKE team has been very busy implementing improvements to our managed Kubernetes service. Check out the new enhanced clusters option, support for cluster add-ons, support for virtual node pools and virtual nodes, and more!

Until now Oracle Cloud VMware Solution customers were limited to the primary storage option, VMware vSAN datastore, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) File Storage service as a secondary storage option. With support for OCI block volumes, you have a new option for scaling Oracle Cloud VMware Solution clusters’ storage capacity.

With Data Safe’s new Audit Insights, you can now get better visibility into audit volume across your fleet databases. You can see the impact of your audit policies, and the types of activities that generate audit data. This visibility helps you make informed decisions on building more effective and better focused audit policies. If you’re already familiar with Oracle Data Safe, check out the Audit Insights capability in the Security Center.

With this certification, Veeam Backup and Replication (VBR) software is fully interoperable with OCI Object Storage using S3 compatible APIs for customers to perform backup and recovery of on-premises databases, applications, bare metal instances, operating systems, virtual machines (VMs), and Oracle Cloud VMware solution workloads running in OCI.

OCI Object Storage exceeds 99.999999999%, or 11 nines, durability. Commodity disks are expected to have a failure rate of 1% over a period of one year, so in an OCI region with exabytes of data, this ratio amounts to many disk failures every hour. How does OCI exceed 11 nines durability with disks that have two nines durability? Check out this First Principles blog and video to find out!

Week of 13th March, 2023

OpenSearch is a community-driven, Apache 2.0-licensed open-source search and analytics suite that makes it easier for you to ingest, search, visualize, and analyze data. We are excited to announce the general availability of OpenSearch 2.3 as part of OCI Search with OpenSearch, a managed service with high performance and low cost. Learn about all the improvements and additions you get if you upgrade in this blog.

Enterprise Scale Baseline Landing Zone (ESBLZ) has enabled customers like you to rapidly onboard workloads to OCI using industry and Oracle best practice guidance. Version 2.0 is built on top of a new modular design to scale efficiently as your environment grows, and provides an updated experience with new and improved features such as support for connecting to other clouds, help with compliance objectives such as CIS Benchmarks 1.2, and automated creation of new accounts, users, and resources on OCI, to name a few.

Long-term storage of backups is an essential part of cybersecurity and resiliency plans for any serious business. This new capability for Oracle's Autonomous Database on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure (ADB-D) and Exadata Cloud@Customer (ADB-C@C) will allow you to select a retention time between 90 days and 10 years, to more easily meet your cybersecurity, business continuity, and compliance requirements for backups.

Oracle Autonomous Linux 8 is the Oracle Linux 8 operating environment built and optimized for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It can automatically patch and update without rebooting to help keep your Oracle Linux operating system secure and available. It is simple to deploy and easy to manage, and is available at no extra charge to paid OCI subscribers. Why should you consider running Autonomous Linux for your applications? Read this blog to find out!

The generation of synthetic data has seen a major uprise in the last few years, powering the latest generation of analytics and AI applications. If you're interested in quickly learning about what synthetic data is, the types of synthetic data, and how you can quickly generate them using a notebook session in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Data Science, check out this blog!

Week of 6th March, 2023 

With this new feature, you can select the latest supported database version or its immediate predecessor database version during Autonomous Container Database provisioning. This provides flexibility to choose an Autonomous Container Database version and apply the corporate governance model to Autonomous Database deployments, allowing Dev-Test to uptake changes and validate regression testing and application impact before UAT and Production deployments. You can now keep your production database environment in the N-1 version and update Dev / Test database environments to the latest version, and thereby avoid deployment risk to your production environment. 

Using OCI Anomaly Detection you can monitor and detect anomalies in your time-series data. We have recently added new capabilities such as Univariate anomaly detection, Multivariate anomaly detection improvements, and Asynchronous detection. Check out this blog for details on how these improvements can help your data analyses.

Since its introduction in early 2021, our next-generation site-to-site IPsec VPN service has seen many enhancements.  If you’re an OCI Site-to-Site VPN customer who wants to take advantage of the added benefits or have been notified about a migration of your tunnels and want to proactively upgrade, this blog is for you.

Oracle Interconnect for Azure enhances cloud interoperability by connecting Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Microsoft Azure clouds by a private, secure, low-latency, and high-throughput network. Oracle Database Service for Azure (ODSA), is an Oracle-managed service that builds on the existing capabilities of the OCI-Azure Interconnect and simplifies the setup, management, and connectivity of application components in Azure to databases running in OCI. If you're wondering how to choose between the two, get our recommendations here.

Data sovereignty is a complex topic, and the definition and applicability can vary by region, but a central theme of data sovereignty is empowering organizations and individuals to retain more control over their data. In this blog series, we examine these and other critical aspects of data sovereignty in the cloud. Start by learning more about location choice, its implications, and the available options. 

Whether you’re a DBA who wants to improve the performance of the analytics powering your applications or an executive looking to solve your organization’s needs, get started with this MySQL Heatwave Foundations course to simplify your database infrastructure, while getting real-time analytics and lowering costs.

Week of 27th February, 2023 

Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that helps you define, install, and upgrade the most complex Kubernetes applications. With Helm attestation, you can now verify a Helm chart before deployment and ensure the integrity of your applications.

Announced at Oracle CloudWorld, this new fully managed OCI service is based on the on-premises Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance technology and delivers protection capabilities for Oracle Database services on OCI to help organizations meet the business-critical need to reduce ransomware risk, the financial requirements for improved operational efficiency, and user expectations for cloud service simplicity.

OCI Full Stack DR provides a single pane of glass monitoring and management capability for all disaster recovery needs. In this blog, learn how to use Full Stack DR to group the dependent components of the application and create automated disaster recovery plans for planned and unplanned scenarios. 

Are you still manually managing thousands of processes across your enterprise environment? This blog presents a high-level Terraform workflow to deploy an Oracle Linux instance in OCI, where we showcase how simple Terraform and its declarative language are when it comes to automating these processes across your environments. 

Enterprise multicloud strategies require reliable, cost-effective, dedicated intercloud connections. A common approach connects clouds indirectly by peering through an intermediate cloud (commonly referred to as transitive cloud routing); however, public clouds typically don’t support this natively. Check out this blog to understand your options and considerations for multicloud network architectures.

Week of 20th February, 2023 

As Oracle Cloud moves to adopt Redwood, Oracle’s next generation design system, we’ve taken the first step by updating the OCI console theme to reflect Redwood branding. While this first change is cosmetic and does not change the familiar functionality or user experiences that you are using today, over the course of time Oracle Cloud will benefit from the improved interaction designs and usability enhancements that this award-winning design system provides.

You can now use Oracle Visual Builder Studio, a free native service on OCI, directly in the console as a hub for integrated agile and collaborative development, code versioning, and CI/CD automation. 

Are you wondering if the OCI-Azure interconnect can support your workload? Or what latency you can expect? This blog post highlights the best practices to optimize network latency using the OCI-Azure Interconnect, and the impact on performance for various types of Oracle workloads. 

Training AI applications using large language models requires powerful clusters of computing infrastructure to process vast amounts of data. See how OCI’s superclusters of AI infrastructure enable customers such as Adept and SoundHound to address their LLM training needs.

We are excited to announce a strategic partnership with platformOS to bring their platform-as-a-service (PaaS) developer ecosystem to OCI. With platformOS on Arm, you can significantly reduce the time to bring scalable solutions to market while benefiting from the best price-performance offered by OCI’s A1 compute.

Week of 13th February, 2023 

Shell stage is a new feature of OCI DevOps service that will allow you to run bash commands and scripts in a container in your tenancy. The beauty of the DevOps deployment pipeline is the simplicity and integration with OCI deployment targets, and we’re pleased to streamline the ability to perform infrastructure changes, deploy to other targets, perform tests, and more.

Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE) is a powerful platform for managing containerized applications on OCI. Longhorn can be used as a storage solution in OKE if you need more fine-grained control over your storage resources. In this blog, learn about using Longhorn, an open-source storage system designed to work seamlessly with OKE.

When using Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE), high availability is essential for ensuring system uptime even when a failure occurs. This blog explains different Kubernetes mechanisms that you can use to distribute pods of a deployment across nodes within an OKE cluster to achieve high availability.

Frustrated by session timeouts? Administrators can now enable Keep me signed in to reduce the number of sign-in prompts for users by configuring a IAM sign-on policy to specify the duration for a signed-in session and how long a signed-in session can be inactive before having to sign in again.

If you’re new to OCI and looking to get started, this blog outlines a few simple ways to learn, free of cost! For beginners, we recommend starting with the Oracle Cloud Overview and the OCI Foundation Associates certification to embark on the OCI journey.

Week of 6th February, 2023 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is now generally available. You can now run supported versions of RHEL on your choice of Intel, AMD, or Arm processors while maintaining access to Red Hat’s support system and knowledge base through your RHEL subscription.

For the sixth time in a row, Oracle has been named a Leader and positioned highest for Ability to Execute by Gartner. Oracle has worked closely with our customers and global network to prioritize releases and deliver prebuilt recipes that simplify complex challenges that enterprise developers may face when connecting applications, data, and devices across distributed cloud environments. 

Announced at CloudWorld 2022, OCI Confidential Computing protects your data in use at the hardware level. Powered by AMD EPYC™ processors, Confidential Computing allows you to enable confidential virtual machines (VMs) with the help of AMD Infinity Guard features, such as secure encrypted virtualization (SEV) and confidential bare metal servers with secure memory encryption (SME).

Is maximum I/O disk performance essential for your Windows-based production service? Choosing the right configuration that can deliver it is critical. In this blog, learn how to achieve the max I/O throughput with a Windows OS-based instance on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in two different ways. 

This blog outlines the high-level steps and best practices to connect Azure Synapse Analytics with Oracle Exadata Cloud service running on OCI using ODSA. Azure Synapse Analytics doesn’t have a private endpoint for the Oracle Exadata Cloud database running on OCI, but this can be solved using ODSA to connect the two clouds using a private IP or endpoint.

Week of 30th January, 2023

Are you wondering what OCI service matches service X on cloud Y? If so, check out this quick guide on how to use our cloud service comparison page, a single page that compares OCI services with those on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.

Are you facing challenges deploying OKE with native pod networking in split-compartment mode? This blog curates the various, disparate documentation into a cohesive guide that you can follow to overcome this common scenario. 

To better support customer and partner requirements, the latest release of the OCI Blockchain Platform and its low-code Blockchain App Builder provides new capabilities for developers building sophisticated blockchain solutions. The main features include OAuth2 secure token support, Web3 API support, Ethereum Interoperability with Atomic Transactions, and much more.

Week of 23rd January, 2023

SQL Dialogs, an innovative feature of Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA), can translate a user's natural language input into SQL queries, send those queries to a backend data source, and then display the response. SQL Dialogs supports a range of queries such as aggregations, implicit filters, combined filters, group by, order by, and queries with relative dates. Watch the SQL Dialog overview or the SQL Dialog data training to learn more. 

The OCI File Storage service now supports cloud-native asynchronous replication as a feature of Oracle's highly available, elastic file system. File Storage replication gives you consistent file system replicas across availability domains, another OCI first in the industry. Your application can use the target file system, fully confident of its consistency.

Week of 16th January, 2023 

In this blog, learn how to to set up a multinode high-performance computing (HPC) cluster powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs on OCI with built-in support for CUDA and SLURM. You will also learn how to install JAX into that environment and get started with multinode JAX code.

With Custom Metrics you can use additional trace data as a source for metrics. Metrics can be configured to include multiple dimensions, as well as an ML-based anomaly detection. These metrics can be used for alerts and be included in cross-services dashboards. With Span Enrichment you can change and add data to ingested spans. Use key-value pairs to translate codes to friendly names, mask sensitive data, block unwanted spans, and more. 

Week of 9th January, 2023

OCI Data Flow notebooks, a fully managed Jupyter-based notebook, is now generally available. Data Flow notebooks provide a web-based interface for you to interactively run your workloads at scale, on TB- to PB-size datasets, against a remote OCI Data Flow-powered Spark cluster, without leaving your notebook session environment. 

What was new in 2022

See our archive of What's New digests from 2022 here!  

 

OCI Cloudsters


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