Nov 28, 2023
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
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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
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