Hi [subscriber:firstname | default:subscriber],
This is OCI Newsletter #15! We've entered summer months so will be interesting to see how active Oracle is on pushing new features during the summer.
Feedback is always valued! Contact me via Twitter @svilmune or just send an email if you have any ideas, comments or if you see I'm missing some good source for the weekly news.

New Features


You can use variables in tags now to further enhance your possibilities with resource tagging. If you are not familiar with tags you can use them for example to track costs within your tenancy.

Here is a tagging guide for AWS, same principles apply for OCI and there is lot more content available on AWS so definitely worth looking and searching how it's done with other cloud providers.
Compute resources can now be moved across compartments! That includes bunch of different resources so soon it should be possible to move almost any resource to a different compartment after creation. In the long run being more flexible is great even though you might not often get cases where you have to move resources to different compartment.

Although this gives interesting possibilities if you want to make resources visible to certain set of OCI users when in a specific deployment phase?

Terraform OCI provider v3.32.0 is out. It includes mainly changes to move resources to different compartments.
Although no official release it seems OCI Resource Manager has had some performance improvements. Earlier if you executed Terraform plan it used to take several minutes. Now it completes in 15-20 seconds!
This used to drive me mad when you are in the middle of testing and always had to wait extra time for it to complete. (In reality I still prefer running Terraform from my own laptop but Resource Manager is really good for demos)
Also in addition I noticed that destroying a DB resource which used to take around two hours now completed in 10 minutes, that's another nice improvement!
Here is a comparison of past and present Terraform actions in OCI Resource Manager.
Comparison of past and present Terraform actions

Blogs & News


Couple posts from Rodrigo Jorge, the first one is about mapping compute shapes against billing information. Good summary on them! Although shouldn't this information be found easily from Oracle documentation as well?
Second post is about how to use ULS (Unlimited Learning Subscription) to learn different areas of Oracle Cloud and complete certifications. Subscription is great if you are enterprise class customer but what about smaller customers, I'd like to see some more cost efficient options as well. And yes, you can always read the documentation!
Matthew Walden has a post about choosing the database backup method on OCI. I really like the comparison table in the start and then seeing how those methods work in reality. Worth reading.
Going back to network basics, Internet and NAT gateway explained. You usually need to setup at least one of them so good to have understanding on them.

Tip of the week


Good statement from Franck Pachot on one of his tweets which is something you should remember:
"Do not use free trial to estimate the cost of Oracle Cloud PaaS. Only the IaaS part consumes credits during the trial. Good to test many things, but not to estimate the price. There's a calculator for that purpose."

Cost estimator.

Remember


I'm not in partnership with Oracle in any way so all opinions are my personal views and should not be taken as an official statement from Oracle.
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Have a great day, thanks for reading!
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