Pat Shuff's Blog
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August 19, 2016
New features in the Oracle Compute Cloud
- Integration of the Oracle Marketplace into the Compute Cloud Console to make it easier to deploy custom solutions
- Expanding the functionality of Backup Services to snapshot Compute Instances and clone them from snapshots
- Making it easier to import existing virtual machines into the Oracle Cloud and making these images available to the Public and Private Marketplace
We talked earlier this week on pulling an image from the Oracle Marketplace. Previous to today you had to go to cloud.oracle.com/marketplace, setup preferences to link your account to your compute account, get an app from the marketplace, and provision the instance through the compute cloud. Today we just need to go into the create instance menu system from the Compute Console and select an image from the Marketplace to provision into a compute instance. This modification reduces the number of steps required to use the Marketplace as well as making it easier to provision preconfigured solutions into a compute instance or set of compute instances.
Note the Marketplace tab below the Private Images. A list of instances in the Marketplace along with a search engine are integrated into the provisioning of a new compute instance.
Compute instances now also have a backup tab similar to the monitor tab that was introduced a few weeks ago. This allows you to create snapshots of whole instances, save the snapshot as a bootable image, and provision new instances based on this snapshot.
This allows you to provision a predefined instance from a default OS or Marketplace instance, customize it, take a snapshot, then provision new instances from the customized installation.
The third new feature release is for users to have the ability to import VMWare instances directly into the Compute Cloud private images. The goal of this release is to allow users to import VMDK formatted images into the Oracle Cloud and run them with little or no modifications. This includes defining multiple network interfaces at import time rather than having to go back and configure multiple interfaces after the fact. The import does not require the users to modify the network drivers before importing but leverages the experience of the Ravello team for translating VMWare definitions into Oracle Compute Cloud definitions using Orchestration to create the network definition and provision it as the compute instance is started.
In summary, three new features were released today to make it easier to use the Oracle Compute Cloud Service. This is an ongoing improvement of services to help allow for frictionless migration of services from your data center into the cloud. These improvements along with those that will be announced between now and Oracle OpenWorld in September will help users treat the Oracle Public Cloud as an extension of their own data center for capacity expansion, disaster recovery, and development and test.