After learning about IAM and Networking in previous parts of this series, it’s time to dive into the heart of the cloud — Compute Services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
OCI Compute offers a range of virtual machines (VMs), bare metal servers, and dedicated hosts — so you can choose the right combination of scalability, performance, and pricing for your workload.
🧠 Key Concepts in OCI Compute
💡 OCI Compute Offers:
- Virtual Machines (VMs) – For standard use cases (web servers, dev/test, apps).
- Bare Metal Instances – High performance, single-tenant physical servers.
- Dedicated Hosts – Reserve full hypervisors to meet compliance or licensing needs.
⚙️ Factors to Consider:
- Scalability
- Performance requirements
- Cost-efficiency
- Image & Shape selection
🧱 Flexible Shapes – OCPUs + Memory
OCI lets you define compute shapes dynamically:
- Choose number of OCPUs and Memory (RAM)
- Resize vertically for demanding apps
- Use predefined shapes like:
- Small
- Medium
- Large
✅ Only Cloud Provider To Offer:
- AMD-based CPUs (great for general compute)
- Intel-based CPUs (for legacy workloads)
- Ampere ARM-based CPUs (optimized for mobile and container workloads)
💸 Cost Efficiency
- Pay-as-you-go pricing model
- 50% cheaper than other cloud providers (per Oracle claims)
-
Preemptible VMs – Ideal for:
- Batch jobs
- Short-lived apps
- Fault-tolerant systems
- Save big for non-critical workloads
🔄 Live Migration
OCI supports live migration of VMs across hosts during hardware maintenance — with no downtime 🚫🕒
🏗️ Instances & Network Setup
To launch an instance in OCI:
- Create a VCN and subnet
- Launch VM and assign it to a subnet
- OCI attaches a VNIC (Virtual NIC) — source of the Private IP
- Optionally assign a Public IP
📈 Scaling in OCI
🔼 Vertical Scaling
- Increase OCPUs or memory
- Requires stop → resize → start
- Some downtime involved
🔁 Horizontal Scaling
- Add/remove instances
- Used in autoscaling groups, HA setups
- No downtime; better resilience
🐳 Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE)
Want to run containers? OCI offers OKE, a managed Kubernetes service.
Cluster Types:
- Basic Cluster – Simpler, ideal for testing/small workloads
- Enhanced Cluster – Advanced options, supports virtual nodes
Node Types:
-
Virtual Nodes (serverless):
- Only available in Enhanced Clusters
- No infrastructure to manage
-
Managed Nodes:
- You manage lifecycle
- Supported in both cluster types
📦 OCI Container Instances
If you don’t want to manage Kubernetes or infrastructure:
- Use OCI Container Instances
- Run containers serverlessly
- Ideal for short-running apps, microservices
⚡ Serverless Compute with Oracle Functions
- Based on FaaS (Function-as-a-Service) model
- Event-driven architecture
- Integrated with OCI events and services
✅ Summary
OCI Compute provides the flexibility and cost-efficiency to power all kinds of workloads — from simple apps to complex, large-scale systems.
- Choose from VMs, Bare Metal, or Dedicated Hosts
- Use flexible shapes to optimize performance vs cost
- Leverage Kubernetes (OKE), Container Instances, or Oracle Functions for modern, containerized and serverless workloads
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