Top 5 Holiday Gifts from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
It’s that time of year again. The feeling of the holidays is here, with that unique combination of warmth, joy, nostalgia, and a sense of togetherness. It is also the time of year for gift giving, when we find, wrap, and give gifts to friends and family. This brings to mind several of the included at-no-charge features of Oracle’s Cloud, known as OCI. This is my list of the top five free technologies that Oracle gives its customers with their OCI tenancy.
5) Oracle’s flavor of Enterprise Linux, known as Oracle Linux, is compatible with all the other Enterprise Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Centos, Rocky Linux, and SUSE Liberty Linux. It gives you a secure Enterprise-grade Linux and a ton of other included features like clustering, Ansible Automation ( More on that in #4 on the list!), KVM Virtualization, FIPS 140 support, and more. Best of all, Mythics has a proven process that allows customers to migrate an existing server to Oracle Linux easily without having to reinstall the operating system or application. This has helped customers save millions of dollars.
4) Oracle Linux Automation Manager, known as OLAM, is a downstream distribution of the AWX project. AWX is the basis of Enterprise Ansible automation projects like Red Hat Automation Platform or CIQ’s Ascender. This gives the Enterprise a centralized platform that allows Ansible playbooks to be used by users to deploy software, patch Linux and Windows systems, build new systems in the cloud, and so much more. This technology is included with an OCI subscription as part of Oracle Linux Premier Support, but it does so much more by managing Windows, Applications, Clous like OCI, Aws and Azure, firewalls, and more.
3) One of the cool features included with OCI is OSMS, the Operating System Management Service. This system allows customers to schedule the patching of Operating systems in OCI. You can build customer groups of servers and then create schedules. It’s a perfect solution when you do not want to deploy something complex like Ansible, though it is limited to just patching.
2) Security is one of the top concerns that customers have. OCI has a tool called VSS, the Vulnerability Security Scanner, that will scan systems for known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) and the National Vulnerability Database (NVD). This system will report on what vulnerabilities have been discovered on what server. Many customers find that this free service replaces more expensive third-party systems.
In the security space, OCI is also unique in that it offers customers the choice to deploy in several secure clouds, all at the same price! Most other clouds charge significantly more based on the location and level of security required!
- Commercial Cloud with HIPPA, SOC, and other popular security certifications
- The US Government cloud, which is FedRAMPed at the high level. This meets the security needs of most Public Sector customers.
- Department of the Defense clouds, with separate clouds that meet DoD requirements for IL5 and IL6. IL6 includes workloads that are Top Secret and are available to customers who need to meet the nation’s highest levels of security.
1) My number one choice is the OCI Free Tier! I personally have been using the Free tier since it was first available, and in that tenancy, I have never had a charge to my credit card; you just have to stick to the always free services. This is a great way to try out OCI and learn how it works.
There are currently 26 OCI IaaS services that have a free tier. This includes the following services;
- Two Oracle Autonomous Databases with Oracle APEX
- Two AMD Compute VMs
- 4 cores and 24GB of ARM Ampere A1 Compute
- 2 100GB boot volumes
- 20G of each tier of Object Storage
- 20 key versions si Oracle Vault
- 1 10 Mbps Load balancer
- 10 TB of Egress bandwidth. That’s enough bandwidth to watch 400 movies!
- Site-to-Site VPN Service
- And More services like Application Performance Monitoring, Logging Service, Monitoring Service
OCI is constantly changing, with new services being added all the time. To help, I host a quarterly webinar that goes over what is new in OCI. You can register for the series here; https://www.eventbrite.com/e/whats-new-in-oci-webinar-series-tickets-700780331837
If you have any questions about these technologies, please feel free to reach out to Mythics. We are happy to help you in your journey to the cloud.