Only few days to go! Another major area with Oracle that has shaped my career in the past ~10 years a lot.
It started with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) gen1 which was confusing experience to say the least, but have to start from somewhere! I didn’t touch much OCI gen1 and only started to use OCI more during 2017/2018.
Found also old architecture diagram from those days which I think would be good lead up for this post.
Back then I had already learned cloud networking to some extend and it felt something that one has to learn to be able to understand concepts better. I still feel that most people should have basics of cloud networking learned.. just from building stuff and making it scalable AND secure.
While OCI won’t probably ever be as popular as few other hyperscalers they have their own strengths and have been able to grow and innovate (like multicloud) to keep themselves relevant.
While announcements of new OCI services have slowed down, I think the core is there and it’ll be a good option for many looking to scale their workloads securely, keeping the costs in check at the same time.
OCI Networking
I don’t know all the internals but the good thing with OCI networking is that it was built way later vs other hyperscalers, they could build the networking using learnings from others. One key thing was always off-box virtualization, instead of using hypervisor for the network virtualization, the activity is moved to smartNIC/dedicated NIC outside of the server itself so the server gets full CPU use instead.
This is another one (and I think major heading where Oracle is going..), RDMA cluster networking. This was strong driver for HPC and now AI workloads to be in OCI. And with the continued discussion of Private/Secure AI, I think this is where OCI will be option for AI workloads. Combine that with the interconnect to other clouds and you have good options for your applications/workloads.
This has to be still said, pricing. I always felt the OCI pricing is something Oracle got right, it was simplified and there weren’t hidden fees to surprise you after implementation. This is still true with networking, you don’t get any egress fees up to 10TB monthly and even after that the pricing is lower vs others. The other thing is that inter-region traffic + traffic through FastConnect is free (minus port charges).
I’m sure other competitors are catching up with these options but there’s a good base to build upon.
Sovereign Cloud & DRCC & Cloud@Customer
Keeping data within your own boundary as well as looking data residency has become major concern for many in past couple years. IMO Oracle was well prepared for this by how they rolled out single-AZ region.
So, adding separate EU Sovereign Cloud was quite logical addition when data residency became a hot topic. Sovereign cloud doesn’t share the same backbone as rest of commercial cloud to create the necessary separation + all the legal separations around it.
DRCC, Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer has been there for a while, you have option to deploy full region/availability zone for yourself with all the OCI services you need. Comes with a cost of course but another option to run OCI services only within your defined boundaries.
And finally, Cloud@Customer, first with Exadata, then with Compute@Customer etc. You get specific services again right at your data centre with automation and toolin what OCI provides. ExaC@C has probably come up for many reading this..
Summary
Like said, OCI has been huge part of my professional journey past years and continues to be one. I’d say it’ll be interesting to read this post in few years to see how it has evolved. Right now I feel like we’re moving towards specific optimized AI cloud with OCI but still keeping the core features there.. especially database which continues to be the bread and butter of your data.
Also, learn cloud networking!