Introduction
As IT environments are growing and becoming more complex, the need for standardization, cost reduction, and greater agility is raising more than ever. Cloud solutions provide customers with features and capabilities to exactly achieve these goals and satisfy their business demands.
When it comes to moving Oracle databases to the cloud, you might ask yourself: “What Cloud should I choose for my Oracle databases?”. There is only one right answer to this question: Oracle Cloud! Why is this? Because Oracle Cloud provides you a huge number of UNIQUE capabilities to benefit from, not only from the pure database perspective, but also regarding the platform, security, and cost-efficiency.
Let’s start the journey and see what you can get exclusively on Oracle Cloud!
Oracle Database
Oracle Exadata is the only pre-configured, pre-tested, and optimized platform to run Oracle database workloads providing high availability, huge capacity, and superior performance. The minimal commitment for the Exadata Cloud Service is 48 hours only enabling everyone – and not only large enterprises – to test and discover the Exadata capabilities. With the X8-M model in the cloud you do not stick to a specific shape like a quarter or half rack anymore, but rather fully flexible to add compute or storage nodes one by one as needed. Furthermore, Automatic Indexing is available on Exadata only.
ORACLE AUTONOMOUS DATABASE runs only on Exadata, and hence available only on Oracle Cloud providing a fully automated environment including auto-scaling and auto-patching. It is available as a simple and elastic service with a minimum of 1 OCPU and 1TB of storage as well as on a dedicated Exadata machine. Autonomous Database is optimized for a Data Warehouse, Transaction Processing, JSON, or APEX. Choose your preferred workload and you are ready to go.
ORACLE REAL APPLICATION CLUSTERS (Oracle RAC) is the proven high availability and scalability solution for your Oracle database. It enables you to scale out and scale in on-demand to provide the performance needed for your application. Oracle RAC makes it also possible to patch your system and database in a rolling manner without database downtime ensuring database high availability and enabling business continuity.
APPLICATION CONTINUITY allows in-flight replay of database transactions providing continuous availability not only for the database but also for the application. Interrupted transactions due to a switchover or failover will appear to the end-user just as a slight delay in execution.
ORACLE MAXIMUM AVAILABILITY ARCHITECTURE (MAA) can only be fully implemented on Oracle Cloud protecting your data from planned and unplanned outages.
ORACLE ZERO DOWNTIME MIGRATION (ZDM) is Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) recommended solution that enables you to directly and seamlessly migrate your Oracle databases from on-premises to Oracle Cloud. ZDM leverages Oracle’s high availability technologies like Data Guard and Golden Gate providing zero-downtime migration. Prepare your environment, set up your configuration, click the button, and enjoy your coffee or tea. ZDM executes all steps for you automatically performing database migrations at a fleet level and reducing time, effort, and human error.
ORACLE DATABASE 21C and further new versions are first available on Oracle Cloud following Oracle’s Cloud First Release Strategy. Developers have early access to new features test and develop new applications and add features to existing ones. Also, third-party application providers have more time to certify their products against the newer database version.
MORE DATABASE FEATURES available exclusively on Oracle Cloud:
- Refreshable PDB Switchover to build high availability at the PDB level, even for Standard Edition databases. In contrast, on-premises, It is available only on Engineered Systems (Exadata and ODA).
- Active Data Guard (ADG) DML Redirection to allow more applications to benefit from ADG in case some write operations are required, extending read-only to read-mostly use cases.
- Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) providing a significantly higher compression ratio than other compression features.
- Database In-Memory Base Level allows you to use Database In-Memory with up to 16GB of column store without triggering any license tracking.
- In-Memory Data Guard.
- ACFS Support for Databases.
- Enterprise Edition with EM Management Packs included at no extra cost.
Network Infrastructure
FLAT, FAST, AND PREDICTABLE PHYSICAL NETWORK infrastructure with a maximum of two hops between any components on the network. Now if you think “why should I care? I’m running only my Oracle Database on Oracle Cloud”. Well, database backup is usually taken into Object Storage, which is a component accessible via the network. “But I don’t care much if my backup would take a bit longer”. Sure, but you very much care about RESTORE times to reduce downtime. If you are running your application on Oracle cloud too, then you’ll see an immense improvement in performance.
GUARANTEED NETWORK RESOURCES even with the Virtual Machine offerings. You get dedicated CPUs, dedicated memory, and dedicated network bandwidth, and with that a predictable performance, whatever your “neighbors” are doing at day or night.
PERFORMANCE SLA for your cloud network provided only by Oracle.
Security
DATA SAFE is a unified database security control center that detects risks introduced by users, data, and configurations. it enables you to detect and mask sensitive data, implement and monitor security controls, monitor database user activity, and address data security compliance requirements. Using Data Safe is included in all Oracle Database Cloud offerings at no additional cost for storing up to 1 Million audit records per month per target database.
ISOLATED NETWORK VIRTUALIZATION provides maximum isolation and protection. Virtualization implemented on the Network Interface Card (NIC) instead of the hypervisor improves security by preventing break-out attacks. If a virtual machine was attacked by hackers, they are not able to extend their attack to further machines running on the same hypervisor. A side effect of this design allows offering a predictable network performance on virtual machines.
CLOUD GUARD enables you to monitor and detect risky configurations and operator activities. Cloud Guard can suggest, assist, or even automatically trigger a corrective action, based on your configuration. You can use the Events and Notification service to get notified whenever Cloud Guard detects an issue you want to be notified about, e.g. a user creates an Object Storage public bucket.
SECURITY ZONES is another service that supplements Cloud Guard functionality. It ensures that customers implement Oracle’s security best practices. A list of policies prevents you from creating a risky configuration, e.g. creating a database with a public IP address. The policies cannot be violated and any action that does not comply with these policies will be rejected. This ensures maximum security and protection of your cloud resources.
With its new cloud services for security, including Cloud Guard, Security Zones, and Data Safe, Oracle has an edge over Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, as it provides a more centralized security configuration and posture management, as well as more automated enforcement of security practices at no additional cost. This allows OCI customers to enhance overall security without requiring additional manual effort, as is the case with AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Cost Efficiency
BRING YOUR OWN LICENSE (BYOL) allows you to enable two OCPUs (which is equivalent to 4 vCPUs) per processor license. In comparison, on authorized cloud environments, you are allowed to enable one vCPU per processor license if hyper-threading is not enabled and two vCPUs if hyper-threading is enabled. Just do the math and see the cost savings.
TRANSPARENT DATA ENCRYPTION (TDE) is enabled by default and included in all Oracle Database Cloud services at no additional cost, even in the Standard Edition.
ENTERPRISE EDITION also includes Data Masking & Subsetting Pack, Diagnostic and Tuning Pack, and Real Application Testing at no additional cost.
AUTONOMOUS DATABASE offers Partitioning, Advanced Compression, Advanced Security, Database Vault, and Label Security at no additional cost. It is also possible to use your Standard Edition licenses for the Autonomous Database. One SE processor license allows you to enable even 4 OCPUs (=8 vCPUs) of the Autonomous Database offering.
Conclusion
On Oracle Cloud you benefit from the highest flexibility to choose from a wide range of Oracle Database deployment options: virtual machines, bare-metal machines, Exadata, and Autonomous Database on shared and dedicated infrastructure to fulfill all your requirements.
Oracle Cloud is the only cloud that offers the full Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) for your mission-critical databases while providing SLAs not only for availability but also for performance and manageability.
Oracle Cloud’s unique capabilities are not restricted to database technologies but include outstanding network performance, highest security, and cost reduction.
Last but not least, keep in mind that not only Autonomous Database, but also all other Database Cloud Services offer a very high degree of automation letting you provision, clone, backup, restore, patch, upgrade, scale up and down, and build high availability and disaster recovery environments by just clicking the button and being done in minutes.
Database Heartbeat 