Putting the Pedal to the Metal
By Leo_Leung-Oracle on Jan 17, 2017
Announcing new IaaS database, compute, storage, and load balancing capabilities
- By Don Johnson, SVP of Product Development, Oracle Cloud Platform
Today, we’re announcing new services and enhancements to the Oracle Cloud Platform. We’re now the first leading cloud provider to offer both bare metal and VM compute shapes, and Oracle Database on bare metal, all on the same innovative virtual network and infrastructure we introduced a few months ago at Oracle OpenWorld. We’re also adding load balancing and a number of storage enhancements. I like to imagine the scenery starting to blur as we pick up speed.
The capabilities are cool, but what’s more interesting is what they enable you to do. Every application, whether traditional or cloud-native, is comprised of different layers and parts that require different levels of IO, processing horsepower, network separation, load balancing... Our aim is to satisfy all those individual requirements, with the same low latency, predictability, and reliability everywhere.
For the front-end, our new IP load balancing service enables distributed, resilient application architectures with a variety of throughput capacities (100Mbps, 400Mbps, and 8,000Mbps). For compute, we’re adding 1, 2, and 4-core virtual machine shapes to complement our bare metal compute options. VMs with fewer cores are great for less compute-intensive parts of an application like the presentation layer (or smaller applications). For data management, we’re enhancing the Oracle Database Cloud Service with new bare metal infrastructure options. This gives customers the flexibility to run their IO-hungry databases without virtualization, which is great for intensive ecommerce, analytics, and other transactional workloads (link to presentation). Finally, we’re beefing up our cloud storage functionality with a new 2TB block volume shape and optional server-side encryption for object storage, for customers that require more units of block capacity, or encryption at rest.
Engineering momentum
This release is a great achievement for our team, and a product of continued engineering momentum. We’re growing the cloud platform team rapidly, adding hundreds of engineers and builders with deep cloud experience over the last year, including distributed system pioneers like Matteo Frigo, soon to be profiled in Oracle Magazine. You can get more detail about our services on our IaaS technical blog, as we both ramp up our capabilities as well as the pace of delivering those capabilities.
Continued investment in infrastructure
Along with investment in great people, we’re also announcing new infrastructure investment, with plans to open new regions in Virginia and UK by mid-2017, with many more to come after that. Similar to our existing Arizona region, each of these regions will offer three or more availability domains, designed for extremely low latency and fault-tolerance. The practical use of availability domains is further detailed in this presentation by Clay Magouyrk and Marc Levy, our VPs of Development and Architecture. Our robust regional design highlights our commitment to enable the best reliability across your entire application portfolio, with the potential to redefine service levels across your apps, all with great economics.
Momentum across a breadth of customers
Our growing investment has been matched by great customer and partner interest. We’ve worked with new customers of all shapes and sizes: from analytic and machine learning startups to enterprise retailers, from high tech to manufacturing, across North America, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. We’ve addressed a range of customer challenges, from cost efficiency and performance to governance and deployment behind the customer firewall. And we’ve handled very different application workloads, from low latency database to high throughput big data, from high CPU to high storage IO, from bare metal to VM workload migration. We’re proud of the diversity, and pumped up to engage even more customers in 2017.
We’re passionate about our cloud platform and about your success. We look forward to your feedback about our broadening portfolio of services. Click here to learn more and to get started online. You can also contact your Oracle representative and ask for Oracle IaaS. To continue the car analogy, our foot is planted firmly on the gas, and we’re ready for the next gear.
– Don
Official Oracle Cloud blog.