Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is always changing! New data centers, the latest features, and extensions to existing ones are being introduced. It means more automation, flexibility, and capabilities to improve user experience, availability, and security for Oracle’s clients and collaborators.
So, what’s new in 2023? First, let’s look at the recent Oracle developments!
Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes – Scaling Simple Operations:
Kubernetes is the open-source software initiative with the second-fastest growth rate in history, right behind Linux. Kubernetes has been around for less than ten years and has gained widespread acceptance, especially in the last few years.
This trend has also been observed in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). As a result, thousands of our enterprise clients in various sectors benefit from the creation of cloud-native applications, which has accelerated their adoption & expanded their use of Kubernetes.
Customers are standardizing on Kubernetes more frequently and using it for more applications than just containerized ones. These applications now include ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) positions, high-performance computing (HPC) allocation, pipelines & databases running on Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes. (OKE).
The use of Kubernetes is growing more and more. By 2024, more than 75% of businesses will be able to use Kubernetes in operations, up from 40% in 2021, according to Gartner. Unfortunately, that figure may exceed 90% by 2026, which is even more alarming, according to Gartner.
They can now operate business Kubernetes at scale thanks to new OKE enhancements that significantly simplify their operational experience.
- Serverless Kubernetes: Without dealing with the difficulties of managing, scaling, upgrading, and troubleshooting the underlying Kubernetes node architecture, it allows customers to guarantee reliable operations at scale.
- Add-on lifecycle management: Customers have more freedom to set up the operational software or related applications.
- Workload identity: The ability to define detailed identity and access management controls at the pod level instead of scoping access rights at the node level improves your security posture.
New OCI block volumes for Oracle Cloud VMware Solution:
Users had only 2 choices for storage for the Oracle Cloud VMware offerings: the VMware vSAN database for main storage & the OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) file-saving service for secondary storage.
A new choice for increasing the storage capacity of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution models is now offered by OCI with the announcement of OCI block volumes’ general availability.
To use OCI block models as an iSCSI database to run VM (virtual machines), ISOs, store templates & other types of data, you can build them as internet-based small computerized structured interface (iSCSI) block devices, connect with the host server of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution & use them in this way.
For their VMware applications on OCI, you can access high-performance, inexpensive block storage with features like performance autotuning, automatic backup, catastrophe recovery, and block storage cloning. The OCI Block Volume service, which offers highly redundant and high-performance storage at a cheap cost, is the most recent storage technology now offered with Oracle Cloud VMware Solution.
You can dynamically provision and control block storage volumes using OCI Block Volume. To satisfy your storage, performance, and application needs, you can build, attach, connect, move, and alter volume performance as necessary. Only instances in the same availability zone can view volumes.
OCI Object Storage – Offering High Durability:
Nowadays, data drives everything, and businesses rely on statistics to succeed. Therefore, one of the top concerns for businesses is data protection. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) created an extremely resilient Object Storage service to avoid data loss.
OCI Object Storage has a durability that is greater than 99.999999999%, or 11 nines. This figure indicates to customers that their chances of experiencing data loss are less than one in a million for ten years.
In an OCI region with exabytes of data, this ratio translates to numerous disk failures every hour since commodity disks are predicted to break at a rate of 1% over a year. As a result, OCI had to make intelligent architectural choices due to the large scale and hardware failure rate to avoid data loss.
Customers need access to data in a cloud storage service even if one or more versions of the data are not readily available. By storing redundant versions of object data, object storage is intended to manage 3–5 concurrent disk failures for the same object. However, exabytes of data require expensive storage, so Object Storage uses the effective storage method known as “erasure coding” to keep data.
Preventing data loss has become ingrained in OCI Object Storage’s programming ethos. However, if one software flaw results in a significant outage or data loss, all hardware failure management methods will be for naught.
Certified as Veeam Ready:
The “Veeam Ready – Object” certification attests to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Object Storage service’s compliance with Veeam’s compatibility and efficiency requirements. Customers can perform restores and backups of on-premises databases, programs, OS, and bare metal instances & virtual machines (VMs) using the certification.
Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) application is completely compatible with Object Storage from OCI through S3-based APIs and is used to run Oracle Cloud VMware service allocations in OCI. The latest backup solution, created using Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, OCI & Veeam, increased backup speeds over tape-based backups by 10 to 12 times.
Veeam backup & replication (VBR) is used by many Oracle clients who want to minimize the amount of physical backup equipment they need to buy and manage while still protecting their on-premises infrastructure.
Additionally, they want to ensure that their copies are kept in affordable, highly reliable storage. To fulfill these requirements, OCI Object Storage easily works with VBR. With this new Veeam Ready certification, OCI advances its goal of ensuring that its clients can securely archive their mission-critical workloads and retrieve them in a timely and reliable manner.
Oracle Audit Insights for Data Safe:
Target databases, schemas, and database users are just a few things you can check out and assess using Audit Insights in Oracle Data Safe. In addition, you can determine what audit rules need to be changed to enhance the general security of your target databases by looking at your top things by audit traffic.
You can get an expanded overview of the auditing data for your target datasets over a given period with Audit Insights. You can evaluate your activity auditing and improve your auditing policies using the different important measurements and charts.
To give you important measurements and distilled views, Audit Insights compiles data from Activity Auditing. You can determine what audit rules need to be changed to enhance the general security of your target databases by looking at your top items by audit volume.
The Bottom Line:
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Engineering handles the most demanding workloads for corporate clients, forcing us to reconsider how Oracle designed the cloud infrastructure. Nowadays, data drives everything, and businesses rely on statistics to succeed. Therefore, one of the top concerns for businesses is data protection.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has designed and brought out multiple new features to its offerings, and there will be more! Want to know more about those deep engineering dives Oracle has taken? Reach out to Doyensys.
