Best of 2023: Getting Started with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Oracle’s next-gen cloud platform, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, has been helping thousands of companies and millions of users run their entire application portfolio in the cloud. Today, the demand for OCI expertise is growing rapidly. Join Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham, along with Rohit Rahi, as they peel back the layers of OCI to discover why it is one of the world's fastest-growing cloud platforms.   Oracle MyLearn: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X (formerly Twitter): https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Kiran BR, Rashmi Panda, David Wright, the OU Podcast Team, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   ------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started. 00:26 Lois: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast. I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me today is Nikita Abraham, Principal Technical Editor. Nikita: Hi there! You’re listening to our Best of 2023 series, where over the next few weeks, we’ll be revisiting six of our most popular episodes of the year. 00:47 Lois: Today is episode 2 of 6, and we’re throwing it back to our very first episode of the Oracle University Podcast. It was a conversation that Niki and I had with Rohit Rahi, Vice President, CSS OU Cloud Delivery. During this episode, we discussed Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s core coverage on different tiers. Nikita: But we began by asking Rohit to explain what OCI is and tell us about its key components. So, let’s jump right in. 01:14 Rohit: Some of the world's largest enterprises are running their mission-critical workloads on Oracle's next generation cloud platform called Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. To keep things simple, let us break them down into seven major categories: Core Infrastructure, Database Services, Data and AI, Analytics, Governance and Administration, Developer Services, and Application Services.  But first, the foundation of any cloud platform is the global footprint of regions. We have many generally available regions in the world, along with multi-cloud support with Microsoft Azure and a differentiated hybrid offering called Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer.  01:57 Rohit: We have building blocks on top of this global footprint, the seven categories we just mentioned. At the very bottom, we have the core primitives: compute, storage, and networking. Compute services cover virtual machines, bare metal servers, containers, a managed Kubernetes service, and a managed VMWare service.  These services are primarily for performing calculations, executing logic, and running applications. Cloud storage includes disks attached to virtual machines, file storage, object storage, archive storage, and data migration services. 02:35 Lois: That’s quite a wide range of storage services. So Rohit, we all know that networking plays an important role in connecting different services. These days, data is growing in size and complexity, and there is a huge demand for a scalable and secure approach to store data. In this context, can you tell us more about the services available in OCI that are related to networking, database, governance, and administration? 03:01 Rohit: Networking features let you set up software defined private networks in Oracle Cloud. OCI provides the broadest and deepest set of networking services with the highest reliability, most security features, and highest performance.  Then we have database services, we have multiple flavors of database services, both Oracle and open source. We are the only cloud that runs Autonomous Databases and multiple flavors of it, including OLTP, OLAP, and JSON.  And then you can run databases and virtual machines, bare metal servers, or even Exadata in the cloud. You can also run open source databases, such as MySQL and NoSQL in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.  03:45 Rohit: Data and AI Services, we have a managed Apache Spark service called Dataflow, a managed service for tracking data artifacts across OCI called Data Catalog, and a managed service for data ingestion and ETL called Data Integration.  We also have a managed data science platform for machine learning models and training. We also have a managed Apache Kafka service for event streaming use cases.  Then we have Governance and Administration services. These services include security, identity, and observability and management. We have unique features like compartments that make it operationally easier to manage large and complex environments. Security is integrated into every aspect of OCI, whether it's automatic detection or remediation, what we typically refer as Cloud Security Posture Management, robust network protection or encryption by default.  We have an integrated observability and management platform with features like logging, logging analytics, and Application Performance Management and much more.  04:55 Nikita: That’s so fascinating, Rohit. And is there a service that OCI provides to ease the software development process? Rohit: We have a managed low code service called APEX, several other developer services, and a managed Terraform service called Resource Manager.  For analytics, we have a managed analytics service called Oracle Analytics Cloud that integrates with various third-party solutions.  Under Application services, we have a managed serverless offering, call functions, and API gateway and an Events Service to help you create microservices and event driven architectures.  05:35 Rohit: We have a comprehensive connected SaaS suite across your entire business, finance, human resources, supply chain, manufacturing, advertising, sales, customer service, and marketing all running on OCI.  That's a long list. And these seven categories and the services mentioned represent just a small fraction of more than 80 services currently available in OCI.  Fortunately, it is quick and easy to try out a new service using our industry-leading Free Tier account. We are the first cloud to offer a server for just a penny per core hour.  Whether you're starting with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or migrating your entire data set into it, we can support you in your journey to the cloud.   06:28 Have an idea and want a platform to share your technical expertise? Head over to the new Oracle University Learning Community. Drive intellectual, free-flowing conversations with your peers. Listen to experts and learn new skills. If you are already an Oracle MyLearn user, go to MyLearn to join the Community. You will need to log in first. If you have not yet accessed Oracle MyLearn, visit mylearn.oracle.com and create an account to get started.  Join the conversation today! 07:04 Nikita: Welcome back! Now let’s listen to Rohit explain the core constructs of OCI’s physical architecture, starting with regions. Rohit: Region is a localized geographic area comprising of one or more availability domains.  Availability domains are one or more fault tolerant data centers located within a region, but connected to each other by a low latency, high bandwidth network. Fault domains is a grouping of hardware and infrastructure within an availability domain to provide anti-affinity. So think about these as logical data centers.  Today OCI has a massive geographic footprint around the world with multiple regions across the world. And we also have a multi-cloud partnership with Microsoft Azure. And we have a differentiated hybrid cloud offering called Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer.  08:02 Lois: But before we dive into the physical architecture, can you tell us…how does one actually choose a region?  Rohit: Choosing a region, you choose a region closest to your users for lowest latency and highest performance. So that's a key criteria. The second key criteria is data residency and compliance requirements. Many countries have strict data residency requirements, and you have to comply to them. And so you choose a region based on these compliance requirements.  08:31 Rohit: The third key criteria is service availability. New cloud services are made available based on regional demand at times, regulatory compliance reasons, and resource availability, and several other factors. Keep these three criteria in mind when choosing a region.  So let's look at each of these in a little bit more detail. Availability domain. Availability domains are isolated from each other, fault tolerant, and very unlikely to fail simultaneously. Because availability domains do not share physical infrastructure, such as power or cooling or the internal network, a failure that impacts one availability domain is unlikely to impact the availability of others.  A particular region has three availability domains. One availability domain has some kind of an outage, is not available. But the other two availability domains are still up and running.  09:26 Rohit: We talked about fault domains a little bit earlier. What are fault domains? Think about each availability domain has three fault domains. So think about fault domains as logical data centers within availability domain.  We have three availability domains, and each of them has three fault domains. So the idea is you put the resources in different fault domains, and they don't share a single point of hardware failure, like physical servers, physical rack, top of rack switches, a power distribution unit. You can get high availability by leveraging fault domains.  We also leverage fault domains for our own services. So in any region, resources in at most one fault domain are being actively changed at any point in time. This means that availability problems caused by change procedures are isolated at the fault domain level. And moreover, you can control the placement of your compute or database instances to fault domain at instance launch time. So you can specify which fault domain you want to use.  10:29 Nikita: So then, what’s the general guidance for OCI users?  Rohit: The general guidance is we have these constructs, like fault domains and availability domains to help you avoid single points of failure. We do that on our own. So we make sure that the servers, the top of rack switch, all are redundant. So you don't have hardware failures or we try to minimize those hardware failures as much as possible. You need to do the same when you are designing your own architecture.  So let's look at an example. You have a region. You have an availability domain. And as we said, one AD has three fault domains, so you see those fault domains here.  11:08 Rohit: So first thing you do is when you create an application you create this software-defined virtual network. And then let's say it's a very simple application. You have an application tier. You have a database tier.  So first thing you could do is you could run multiple copies of your application. So you have an application tier which is replicated across fault domains. And then you have a database, which is also replicated across fault domains.  11:34 Lois: What’s the benefit of this replication, Rohit?  Rohit: Well, it gives you that extra layer of redundancy. So something happens to a fault domain, your application is still up and running.  Now, to take it to the next step, you could replicate the same design in another availability domain. So you could have two copies of your application running. And you can have two copies of your database running.  11:57 Now, one thing which will come up is how do you make sure your data is synchronized between these copies? And so you could use various technologies like Oracle Data Guard to make sure that your primary and standby-- the data is kept in sync here. And so that-- you can design your application-- your architectures like these to avoid single points of failure. Even for regions where we have a single availability domain, you could still leverage fault domain construct to achieve high availability and avoid single points of failure.  12:31 Nikita: Thank you, Rohit, for taking us through OCI at a high level.  Lois: For a more detailed explanation of OCI, please visit mylearn.oracle.com, create a profile if you don’t already have one, and get started on our free training on OCI Foundations.  Nikita: We hope you enjoyed that conversation. Join us next week for another throwback episode. Until then, this is Nikita Abraham... Lois: And Lois Houston, signing off! 12:57 That’s all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. 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