Hi [subscriber:firstname | default:subscriber],
Welcome to the Issue #26 of OCI Newsletter - This week we are running OpenWorld Edition with variety of announcements.
One, which I think is the most important is the Always Free Tier for customers! Keynote on Monday was exciting to watch apart from Larry trying to rip Amazon apart on 95% of the slides. Competition is good but do it in a good faith!
Oracle also did great work whole week on bringing diverse, skilled people on keynotes, panels and various presentations - this is excellent direction from the company!

New Features


Starting with Free Tier, this has always been my number one complaint if anyone has asked what really annoys me with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Finally they've listened customers and seen the light how to get more people using OCI, and it's not just free for 30 days but you get them Always Free! You still get those $ 300 worth of credits for 30-days but some resources are always free. This includes:
  • Compute (up to two instances)
  • Autonomous Database (up to two database instances)
  • Load Balancing (one load balancer)
  • Block Volume (up to 100 GB total storage)
  • Object Storage (up to 20 GiB)
I'd say that's pretty cool!
More details on the Free resources can be found from here and some specifics for Autonomous Database Free Tier here.
Another major announcement was regarding Oracle Autonomous Linux, still more details to come but it will be another service on the Autonomous product line with automatic updates, patching and tuning while the system is running. Will be interesting to see what kind of use cases will form around this!
Autonomous Linux is discussed in more detail here with few handy screenshots. You can already download image from Marketplace and start testing it.
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution announced, note that this is not a managed service. This outlines the possibilities rather well in my opinion:
Customers get full control to build and manage their cloud VMware environment exactly as it runs in their own data center. They can extend their on-premises software defined data center into the Oracle Cloud for easy migration and consistent operations on both sides of the cloud fence. Customers can choose the version of VMware and decide when to upgrade, or decide not to.
Many people have been really excited on this new VMware Solution what I've briefly discussed on with them. VMware's press release is available as well.
More OCI Regions announced to be coming soon, in the keynote there was a lot of comparison towards Amazon and while there might be SOME cases where you can say you are doing it better they still usually deploy Regions with multiple Availability Zones.
It seems Oracle forgets to mention this in their press releases and while it's completely fine to do so it would be good to highlight to potential customers early on that this will have direct impact on designing the solution! "Regional subnets only available on selected Regions.."
Cool update in the OCI Marketplace, they can now bill on behalf of their partners through Marketplace. This means you can launch a solution through Marketplace and it will be billed together with your OCI resources without a need for a separate bill. Very handy!
Few announcements related to Security; Security Zones, Oracle Cloud Guard and Data Safe which was released already last week. I was not sure about Data Safe pricing on last week's newsletter but apparently there are no additional costs on running it! Would be great to see this in documentation link as well.
Generation 2 Exadata Cloud at Customer is available. You can see it being available through OCI Console, hopefully that will improve the administration capabilities also for it as I've heard some stories from Cloud at Customer users.. not always so positive ones!
Terraform OCI provider v3.44.0 is out, with support to above Gen 2 Exadata Cloud at Customer.

Blogs & News


Summary of major announcements from OpenWorld, you can see mention also of expansion with Oracle and Microsoft partnership to new Regions.
How Kinetica Active Analytics platform can help you analyze massive amounts of data, you can deploy it through Oracle Marketplace.
Datadog has extended it monitoring and analytics to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Using A10 networks solution in Oracle Cloud through Marketplace.
New API Gateway Service is on Limited Availability, you can try to enroll on the program if you see it would be useful.
I'm sure in the upcoming weeks we will get links to presentations from OpenWorld and new blog posts on the new features, exciting times!

Tip of the week


You can provision a sample app by using Resource Manager which uses only Free Tier resources, go through the script as I've heard it might deploy resources in the root compartment. Always use compartments from the start!

Remember


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.

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 an awesome day, thanks for reading!
Simo
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