Oracle brings Arm-based OCI Ampere A1 Compute

Oracle announced a range of tools, solutions, and support including its first Arm-based compute offering, OCI Ampere A1 Compute. Available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Oracle will be the only major cloud provider to offer its Arm compute instances at only one cent per core hour, the industry’s lowest cost per core and with flexible VM sizing allowing it to be customized based on memory and core requirements. This means customers can run cloud-native and general-purpose workloads on Arm instances with significant price-performance benefits.

“The increasingly distributed nature of work means modern applications don’t just live in the cloud, it lives at the edge. In Asia Pacific this is being driven by smart industry-edge applications, real-time analytics and IoT, as businesses seek to improve operations and deliver new experiences to their customers. These applications need infrastructure that is open, extremely efficient, scalable and secure. This is what ARM architectures deliver and with the price performance on offer we expect to see rapid uptake in the region” Chris Chelliah, Senior Vice President, Technology and Customer Strategy, Asia Pacific & Japan.

“Ampere instances on OCI is a breakthrough for developers. Oracle’s Free Tier is a great offering that allows them to test the OCI Ampere A1 compute platform and experience the first-cloud native processor that delivers predictable performance, scalability and power needed,” said Renee James, founder, chairman and CEO, Ampere Computing. “The Oracle dev cloud has all the tools developers need to try new technology, get excited about new platforms and develop new applications.”

“The infrastructure industry has been bound to a one-size-fits-all approach to computing, but the next era of compute relies on secure and powerful purpose-built processing,” said Chris Bergey, SVP and GM, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. “By bringing to market Arm-based OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances, Oracle is giving customers and developers a choice that is flexible and able to deliver a new level of price-performance to further enable innovation in the cloud.”

New Arm Accelerator Program, Oracle Cloud Free Tier, and App Development Ecosystem

Oracle is investing in the Arm ecosystem, providing developers with more choice in compute instances and the best price-performance, compared to any other x86 instance on a per core basis.

Three distinct offerings are available to developers to get started on OCI.

With Oracle Cloud Free Tier, developers receive US$300 in free credits for 30 days.

The Always Free Arm access gives developers four Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB memory – one of the industry’s most generous offerings.

A newly launched Arm Accelerator program, gives open source developers, ISV partners, customers and universities with Arm-based development projects that need more resources beyond what the Oracle Cloud Free Tier provides, the ability to apply to receive Oracle Cloud credits for a 12-month period.

Additionally, to help customers take advantage of the latest in Arm technology, Oracle is working closely with a wide variety of technology and open source partners, such as GitLab, Jenkins, Rancher, Datadog, OnSpecta, NGINX, and Genymobile. To help grow and enrich the Arm developer ecosystem, Oracle also announced that it is joining the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), an open source, vendor-neutral community for sustaining the fastest growing CI/CD open-source projects.

New Ampere Altra Arm Processor Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Arm architectures are extremely efficient, scalable and flexible, making the processor suitable for everything from smartphones, IoT devices, PCs, automotive and industrial applications, to supercomputers and servers. From the edge to the cloud, customers can take advantage of Oracle’s range of compute options, its powerful bare metal servers and one of the industry’s first Arm-based flexible virtual machine shapes so they can right-size for a diverse set of compute-intensive workloads including:

· General Purpose: The OCI Ampere A1 Compute provides superior price-performance for general purpose workloads, such as web servers, application servers and containers.

· In-memory Caches and Databases: From databases to analytics, Arm processors deliver predictable performance for databases and memory-heavy workloads, such as in-memory databases.

· Mobile Application Development: Ideal for the density and scale needed for the development and testing of mobile applications, and for iOS or Android-based applications, they eliminate the need for an emulator or nested virtualization.

· Computationally Intensive and Scientific Applications: Arm processors provide the price-performance benefits that make it a commonly used platform for high performance compute-intensive and scientific applications.

In terms of benchmarks, when running x264 video encoding workloads on OCI Ampere A1, Oracle saw up to a 10 percent performance increase, and up to a 22 percent price-performance benefit compared to x86 based systems. For NGINX reverse proxy workloads on OCI Ampere A1, Oracle saw up to a 46 percent performance increase, and up to a 62 percent price-performance benefit compared to x86 based systems.