Oracle Cloud (OCI) Top 15 New Releases That You Must Know

Finally, the year 2020 is about to end, and as always Oracle Cloud has announced many new features on OCI the entire year. So it’s time to take a round trip on the top 15 new releases so that you don’t miss out on any important update.

In this blog post, I am going to cover some of the latest updates and announcements of the year for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Let’s get started!

What’s New In 2020 For Oracle Cloud (OCI)?

There have been many major and minor changes in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure this year with a tremendous amount of innovation. We will be discussing some major ones in this blog.

1. Oracle Cloud Regions

Oracle has opened 9 new cloud regions in the year 2020: UK West (Newport) being the latest. With this, Oracle now operates a total of 27 cloud regions worldwide—21 commercial and 6 government.

2. One URL for OCI Console!

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure commercial region users can now use a single One URL to access the Oracle Cloud Console regardless of the tenancy’s home region. The new URL is https://cloud.oracle.com

Check out quick steps for How to Register For FREE Oracle Cloud Trial Account

3. Oracle Cloud Advisor

Cloud Advisor is a single interface that provides a comprehensive look into the health of your cloud, finds potential problems, and set up the plan to act upon it, hence making it easier to build out cloud infrastructure in a more secure manner. With these capabilities, Oracle is helping to shift more of the security responsibilities from the customer to the cloud provider.

advisor_dashboard

4. Security Zones & Cloud Guard

Security Zones is the preventive control measure, designed to stop you from making bad implementation choices that would weaken your security stance. Security Zones enforce strict and best practices security rules that are locked and can’t be modified.

Read our blog for more info on Security Zones in Oracle Cloud (OCI)

Cloud Guard is a cloud-native service that helps customers monitor, identify, achieve, and maintain a strong security posture on Oracle Cloud. Upon detection of potential issues, Cloud Guard can suggest, assist, or take corrective actions, based on your configuration. Basically, Cloud Guard is used where security zones can’t work.

cloud guard

5. Oracle Cloud Observability & Management Platform

Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform provides a comprehensive and connected solution, to manage the infrastructure, comprised of related services which include the newly announced services such as

Logging
Logging Analytics
Application Performance Monitoring
Database Management
Operations Insights
Service Connector Hub

as well as existing services such as Monitoring, N otifications, Events, Functions, Streaming and OS Management.

Read our blog for more info on Oracle Cloud Observability and Management Platform

Oracle-Live_-Multicloud-Observability-and-Management

6. Longer-Running Functions, up to 5 Minutes

Oracle Functions is a serverless platform that lets you create, run, and scale business logic without managing any infrastructure. You can now run workloads that need up to 5 minutes of function run time. Previously, this time was limited to 2 minutes. This increase will help customers who need extra processing time to run their functions.

Read more in detail about Oracle Functions

To use this feature, you can set the maximum function timeout value up to 300 seconds.

fn_timeout_300

7. Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP)

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure now allows you to Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) address space to use with Load Balancer. Oracle performs a validation process on imported CIDR blocks, and after validation, the CIDR block is available for you to manage. You can create one or many public IP pools from this address space and use IP pools to allocate reserved public IP addresses for specific resources.

BYOIP

8. Modifiable VCNs, Subnets, and VLANs

Did you ever make your VCN too small or too big? Oracle released modifiable network components this year that means you can now update VCN and subnet CIDR block information even after creation:

A VCN now supports up to five /16 CIDR blocks.
You can add or remove CIDR blocks from a VCN.
You can expand or shrink the size of CIDR blocks in use by VCNs, subnets, and VLANs.
There is validation in place to make sure shrinking a CIDR block will not affect an IP address that is in use.

Read our blog to know more in detail about Networking In Oracle Cloud (OCI): VCN, Subnet, Gateways, Peering, Transit Routing

modifiable vcn, subnet

9. Private DNS

No more Custom DNS resolvers! Oracle Private DNS allows you to use your own private DNS domain names and fully manage the associated zones and records to provide hostname resolution for your applications running within and between VCNs, as well as your on-premises or other private networks. A private DNS resolver answers DNS queries for a VCN as per the configuration you create.

Private DNS

10. Compartment Explorer Renamed to “Tenancy Explorer”

The compartment explorer is now called the “tenancy explorer.” There are no changes to the functionality of this feature. To navigate to the tenancy explorer: Open the navigation menu. Under Governance and Administration, go to Governance and click Tenancy Explorer.

tenancy explorer

11. Exadata X8M Cloud Service

Exadata X8M is the latest generation Exadata Database Machine that provides in-memory performance for both OLTP and Analytics with capacity, sharing, and cost benefits of shared storage. Last year, Oracle released Exadata X8M for on-prem, and it is also available in Oracle’s next-generation cloud, i.e. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Read everything you need to know about Exadata X8M On Oracle Cloud (OCI)

create-exadata-x8m

12. NoSQL Database Cloud Service

Oracle NoSQL Database is a fully managed database cloud service that is designed for database operations that require predictable, quick responses to simple queries. NoSQL Database Cloud Service allows developers to focus on application development without dealing with the hassle of managing back-end servers, cluster deployments, software installation/patches/upgrades, backup, and high availability configurations.

NoSQL Database Cloud Service can be suited for applications such as the Internet of Things, user experience personalization, instant fraud detection, and online display advertising.

Read more on Oracle official docs NoSQL Database

13. Autonomous Data Guard on Dedicated Exadata Infrastructure & Exadata Cloud@Customer

Autonomous Data Guard on an Autonomous Container Database can be enabled for both dedicated Exadata infrastructure and Exadata Cloud@Customer that creates a standby (peer) Autonomous Container Database that provides high availability and disaster recovery for the primary database.

For more info read our blog Exadata Deployment Options: Cloud Service (ExaCS) vs Cloud at Customer (ExaCC) vs Exadata Machine

14. Upgrade BM or VM DB Database Instances to Oracle Database 19c Using the Console or API

An in-place database upgrade can be performed now for bare metal and virtual machine DB systems to Oracle Database version 19c. The upgrade can be performed using the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Console, or by using the REST API.

15. Autonomous Database now offers refreshable clones

You can now create a refreshable clone of an Autonomous Database deployed on shared infrastructure. A refreshable clone is a read-only clone that stays “connected” to, and has the ability to pull in data (ie. refresh) from, its source database with a simple click of a button.

refreshable clone ADB

Conclusion

2020 has been a productive year for Oracle Cloud with some amazing and innovative features introduced for OCI, but there could be more features coming before the year ends. Also for me, some major areas of focus have been: New cloud regions, Security, and Database. What features grabbed your attention this year? Do let us know in the comment.

Related/References

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