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.