Oracle Unveils Enhancements Across Cloud Infrastructure, Security at CloudWorld

Oracle is continuing to grow its cloud platform with a series of updates and enhancements that it announced this week at the company's Oracle CloudWorld 2023 event in Las Vegas.

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) updates include enhanced compute power, development tools, access governance, hybrid cloud support, distributed cloud strategies, and data security capabilities.

On the infrastructure front, Oracle delivered new Nvidia Ampere-based GPU virtual machine instances. On the hybrid side, Oracle and Red Hat expanded their partnership to certify OpenShift Container Platform on OCI. In distributed cloud news, Oracle also announced new data security capabilities like information rights management and tokenization services on OCI.

Key updates for OCI include:

Larry Ellison's Vision for Oracle Cloud's Differentiated Capabilities 

In a keynote address at Oracle CloudWorld 2023, founder and Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison detailed the progress his company has made in the cloud, particularly with AI.

Related:Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Expands with Compute Cloud@Customer

At the event, Oracle announced that its Enterprise Generative AI service is now in limited availability. The service provides organizations with access to the foundation AI model powered by Cohere, which was originally announced back in June.

Ellison-Oracle

Looking specifically at Oracle's cloud footprint, Ellison boasted about its growing size.

"Oracle has more cloud regions than AWS, than Azure, than Google," Ellison claimed. "Right now we have 64 major regions."

Beyond the major regions, Ellison also noted that Oracle has its Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer offering, which puts Oracle Cloud resources inside of a customer data center.

More Nvidia GPUs Come to Oracle's Cloud

At the heart of any cloud service are compute instances, which is an area that Oracle is continuing to expand.

At Oracle CloudWorld, a series of new OCI Compute instances were announced. Among them are the OCI Compute Bare Metal Instances powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs, which are widely used for training large language models (LLMs). There are also new instances powered by Nvidia L40S GPUs that are largely targeted for use in AI inference workloads.

Additionally, Oracle announced the general availability of new Nvidia Ampere-powered GPU compute instance families on OCI. Nvidia's latest Ampere architecture GPUs allow customers to more efficiently train complex machine learning models. The new instances provide the accelerated performance needed for tasks such as rendering CGI scenes for movies or developing virtual reality experiences.

Related:Comparing Cloud Giants: 5 Key Differences Between AWS and Azure

Application Development and Security on OCI Get a Boost

Oracle also introduced enhancements to developer tools and services available on OCI at Oracle CloudWorld 2023. 

Among the developer updates is the release of Java 21 and GraalOS. According to Oracle, GraalOS allows applications to run natively on machines, taking full advantage of Arm and Intel processors through lower latency, faster starts, and reduced memory usage.

Cloud security and compliance is becoming ever more important as companies move more workloads and data to the public cloud. Recognizing this need, Oracle has announced several new features for its Oracle Cloud Access Governance product. The expanded capabilities are aimed at helping customers strengthen access controls and simplify regulatory compliance activities in Oracle Cloud.

Some of the key new features include resource classification, enhanced permissions reporting, and approval workflows. Resource classification allows cloud administrators to tag cloud resources with metadata to easily organize them and apply consistent access policies only to approved users and applications. This helps ensure sensitive information is not exposed accidentally.