ociweekly2
Hey [subscriber:firstname | default:subscriber],

Wow talk about a week! There's few new instances types, preemptible and burstable, which are definitely worth checking. Burstable has lot of potential for cases where you can save with your OCI costs!

New Console UI which you might have seen been mentioned after logon. It's great! The old one wasn't bad either so it's super that they still update it frequently to get things improved.

What about all the network updates? There's support for IPv6, new Network Visualizer, Inter-Region latency dashboard and more!

But biggest network update for me this week is definitely updates to DRG!

That's not all, check the what's new section below!

What's new?

Let's start with the Database Migration Service! It's based on the Zero Downtime Migration which is now available easily usable from the Console. The whole documentation is available here, and like you can see it's packed with content!

ZDM had really good setup instructions earlier but required many manual steps, I'm excited to test this out and see how it will help us with migration efforts!

At the moment it supports migration with few different methods and destination only to Autonomous DB but I'm hoping we will see more destinations in the future! (like normal DB!)

Official post has handy video on the service AND good summary, destinations and migration methods!
Since I do lot of network designs this is definitely my favourite of the week! DRG gets major updates and is a lot like AWS Transit GW. Previously for Transit networking you had to have Transit VCN to route traffic through and inter-VCN connectivity through Transit VCN wasn't allowed.

But now you can do it simply by attaching VCN's to DRG and modifying route table which acts as control who can talk and where. It also enables you to do single-arm security configurations where all traffic goes through virtual firewall appliances.

You can peer remote Regions also to DRG with RPCs in different Regions and Tenancies.

For all the network geeks out there, it also supports ECMP (equal cost multipathing) for active-active cases. Sweet!
New instance types! Preemptible instances are slightly similar as AWS Spot instances, you can run them with lower cost but you have to be prepared the instance to go down in the middle of your execution. So once that capacity is required elsewhere, instance will be terminated.

I didn't yet find out can you immediately spin up a new instance if old one is terminated or what's the logic how it works. Also you can't use instance pools (at least yet) so this will be limited to single instance for now from that perspective. You could try spinning up multiple these and see what happens?
Burstable instances give you ability to run your workloads with 12,5% or 50% of capacity you normally run on oversubscribed instances. You might or might not be able to burst when you have the requirement so something to remember.

Possibly great for non-critical workloads, not so great (read: don't use) for production workloads!

Cost will be determined on the reserved capacity so if you run 1 OCPU with 12,5% capacity it's quite cheap! And maybe quite slow too..

Official post on Burstable instances is here to give you more insight.
Network Visualizer gives you either Regional Network Topology view or VCN specific view. It also shows you routes going out from VCN and other useful info. Great to see where you might be missing routes or some other configuration!
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Official announcement on the Visualizer is here.
IPv6 is available for everyone, not just GovCloud! If you enable it for your VCN, Oracle will allocate /56 block for each VCN.

Here's again the official post on explaining IPv6 on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Inter-Region latency dashboard will help you see latencies between any OCI region. It's pretty neat to see how each Region is connected to the other.
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Distributed tracing is available for Functions. This is integrated with Application Performance Monitoring and makes it easier to debug and trace any problems within your Functions.
API Gateway update, you can cache responses to improve performance!

Another update on API Gateway is support for request validation for incoming requests.
Service Connector Hub supports now two new connectors: Streaming source and Functions task.
Operations Insights supports now also external Databases and hosts and not only OCI Databases!

Blogs & News

Remember OCI Block Volume replication from last week! I made two-post series on it, first one looking on basics of it and second part on looking how to automate provisioning an instance with Replica volume. Let me know if you found this interesting!

Block Volume Replica - Basics

Block Volume Replica - Automation
Andy has a post on notifications you might get on OCI if your tenancy has some unusual activity. Never seen this before (maybe it's a good thing?), and really useful to see these kind of notifications coming out automatically!
Martin has a post on the Dynamic Ansible OCI Inventory Plugin. And some good tips on using it!
Do you know how to access your MySQL OCI Service with Public IP?
Kudos to Oracle on this! It's clever marketing tactic of course, but getting some real-world examples to Architecture Center is fantastic idea.

I don't know details on the project obviously, but just wonder what made them do Availability Domain like presented in the diagram. Earlier I was having some design thoughts on that myself.

These will be great for learning and having some discussions around decisions being made with real designs!
Sweet use case for new Network Load Balancer! Use it with your custom DNS solution to make it highly available, you only need to add one entry on your resolv.conf if you'd go with this approach.
A-Team has a post on deploying Golden Gate Microservices on OCI using the Marketplace image. Would be interesting to see post comparing GG Cloud Service vs Marketplace!
How to deploy your Terraform configuration with a click of a button!

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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