Ampere A1 Compute and Oracle TimesTen on OCI

The Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Ampere Altra A1 compute platform provides deterministic performance, linear scalability, and secure architecture at the best price-performance ratio in the market.

Our uniquely flexible VM shapes scale from 1 to 80 cores and 1 to 64 GB of memory per core. You can select the specific number of cores and memory for your VMs. This flexibility lets you build VMs that better match your workload requirements while optimizing your budget.

OKE is an OCI service that enables you to easily create, manage, and deploy applications to Kubernetes clusters. The nodes in a Kubernetes cluster are OCI compute instances. When you create the node pools, you can choose an A1 flexible shape for your worker nodes and use an Arm processor.

Why Arm processors?

The data center and public cloud markets are changing, and Arm processors are coming quickly. Multiple CPU architectures will once again become the norm. Customers have diversity and choices for building their next generation of applications, and Arm, AMD, X86, and GPUs are leading the way. The single thread per core of the Arm processor design eliminates the potential thread-security issues and provides isolation for customer workloads. This helps lower the risk due to side-channel attacks.

For in-memory database workloads, you can configure an A1 VM instance with a high core-to-memory ratio. With the ability to select up to 64 GB per OCPU, you can create an A1 flexible VM with 16 OCPU and 1024 GB, with savings over the default memory-to-core ratio.

What is Oracle doing to support Arm server-side development?

Arm, Ampere, and leading ISVs are partnering with Oracle to make Arm server-side development easy and cost-effective. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), in collaboration with partners, provides an easy path to transition, build, and run your Arm-based applications with the best price performance in the cloud.

Oracle has released supported aarch64 distributions of Oracle Linux, Java, Oracle Database, and MySQL to jumpstart your development on the Arm compute platform.

We are happy to announce that Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Supports Linux ARM 64-bit (see https://blogs.oracle.com/timesten/post/timesten-supports-linux-arm64 - Thanks Jenny for sharing)

By adopting the in-memory database workload model, you can optimize the cost of computing resources and reduce the number of licenses and costs associated with the Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database. For example, 16 OCPUs are used instead of 64 OCPUs, with 16GB per core, for the same 1024 GB of memory.

By running on the Ampere (Altra/AltraMax and AmpereOne) platform, you can run on the cost-effective and scalable Arm-based platform, with specific advantages available for Ampere Altra customers. Everyone (1) Processor license covers four (4) OCPUs - A Core Processor Licensing Factor of 0.25.

Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Kubernetes

TimesTen is well suited to running in containerized environments and, combined with the TimesTen Kubernetes Operator, provides a simple and robust solution for high-performance, highly available data management in Kubernetes environments. The?Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database for Kubernetes offering enables TimesTen deployment on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Container Engine for Kubernetes or on on-premises infrastructure. It can quickly deploy TimesTen in standalone mode or as a cache (for Oracle Database).

Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database (TimesTen)

TimesTen is a lightweight in-memory database that offers unrivaled performance, simple installation and management, high performance, and high availability. TimesTen supports SQL, standard APIs, complete ACID properties, and highly available replication mechanisms. A TimesTen database resides entirely in physical memory and is persistent and recoverable. You have the following options:

• Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database is a memory-optimized relational database that provides responsiveness and high throughput for applications. Through transactional replication, TimesTen offers high availability for the in-memory database.
• Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database Cache is ideal for caching performance-critical subsets of an Oracle database for improved response time in the application tier. Cache tables can be read-only or updatable. Applications automatically?read and update the cache tables using standard SQL?and data synchronization between the cache and the Oracle database. Cache offers applications the full generality and functionality of a relational database, the transparent maintenance of cache consistency with the Oracle database, and the high performance of an in-memory database.

You may have already reaped the benefits of?TimesTen operating behind the scenes. Here are some examples of TimesTen in action today:?

• TimesTen handles the billing for over a billion mobile phones worldwide as the database for customer balances.
• TimesTen handles 60% of the database access for one of the biggest multinational e-commerce companies as a cache in front of the Oracle Database.

Learn more

https://blogs.oracle.com/timesten/post/oracle-timesten-inmemory-database-for-kubernetes

https://blogs.oracle.com/database/post/announcing-oracle-database-19c-support-for-arm

https://blogs.oracle.com/database/post/run-oracle-database-on-arm