Introducing Autonomous Database Free Container Image

September 19, 2023 | 3 minute read
Can Tuzla
Principal Product Manager
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Containerization is a technology commonly used in software development and testing to package a database or application including into a single container image. These containers are isolated and self-sufficient, meaning they can run consistently across different computing environments, such as development laptops, testing servers, and production data centers. Doing development and testing on container images has several advantages in terms of portability, efficiency, scalability, CI/CD pipelines and so on. Autonomous Database Serverless (ADB-S) was also built with these principles in mind, and that’s why it’s perfectly suited for not only production workloads but also development and testing use cases. ADB-S customers can provision/clone an instance or scale up/down their existing instances within seconds while taking advantage of the endless automation that the service offers. However, there are still a few pain-points that developers may experience:

  • Cost: ADB-S not only offers competitive service pricing but also an Always Free tier, which gives you 2 free instances per tenancy, and as the name suggests, they are always free! However, if you have tens or hundreds of developers, provisioning an instance for each one of them may not be cost effective for some organizations.
     
  • Offline development: Development and testing on ADB-S (or any other cloud service) requires internet connectivity. In other words, you cannot spin up an instance in your local desktop/laptop and start developing.

Given the benefits of both ADB-S and container images, wouldn’t it be great to bring the best of both worlds together and offer it for current and prospective ADB-S customers? We thought so too; hence, we are announcing the general availability of Autonomous Database free container image today! The image comes with two ADB-S instances (Data Warehousing and Transaction Processing) and has most of the capabilities offered in a paid instance on Oracle Cloud including but not limited to:

  • Built-in tools such as SQL Developer Web, APEX, and Data Studio,
  • Accessing external data sources via DBMS_CLOUD,
  • Calling web services via UTL_HTTP or sending emails via UTL_SMTP,
  • Creating database links,
  • JAVA, and many more.

I want to emphasize once again how big of a deal this new Autonomous Database free container image is for developers. Here are a few reasons why you or your developers should take advantage of this product:

  • If you are an existing customer, it will enable you to provide an ADB-S environment for each one of your developers at no cost.
  • If you are a prospective customer, it will let you explore a feature-rich cloud service, again at no cost, and without any commitment.
  • Spinning up a container image takes no longer than a couple of minutes, just like provisioning an ADB-S instance on Oracle Cloud so you don’t sacrifice agility.
  • The container image lets you do offline development. Wherever you go, you can access the local copy of your ADB-S instance on your laptop even if you don’t have internet connectivity.

In conclusion, Autonomous Database free container image represents a significant milestone for developers and organizations alike. By seamlessly blending the power of containerization with the versatile capabilities of Autonomous Database, this image provides a like-for-like experience at no cost for both existing and prospective customers. In essence, this announcement bridges the gap between flexibility, efficiency, and accessibility, which makes this image a compelling choice for modern software development and testing needs. Last but not least, Autonomous Database free container image is available on both Oracle Container Registry and GitHub. Check out our documentation on how to download and start using it.

Can Tuzla

Principal Product Manager

Can is a Principal Product Manager for Oracle Autonomous Database (ADB-S) and has been with the company since 2014. Prior to joining the ADB-S team, he worked on the Oracle Multitenant and Oracle Query Optimizer teams. Can holds a MS (Computer Science) from Case Western Reserve University and a BS (Computer Engineering) from Bilkent University.

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