Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) - Part 1

This article was originally published on our Pro-tips Blog.

Oracle's Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) continues to evolve as new services and capabilities are added. We've assisted many of our clients navigate their move to various cloud platforms. For several of my Oracle-heavy clients, OCI has turned out to be a natural choice. I figured it would be helpful to share some of our experience and knowledge around OCI. In this series, I will cover a few important topics noted below. I expect this series to be beneficial for anyone involved in OCI pricing & planning, Oracle software asset management, and ongoing cost management in the cloud.

• OCI Part 1 - Where to Begin.
• OCI Part 2 - OCI Contract Types.
• OCI Part 3 - Licensing, Discounts, and Support Rewards.
• OCI Part 4 - Overview of the key OCI services.
• OCI Part 5 - Compute Service.
• OCI Part 6 - Database Service (DBCS) - VMs and Exadata.
• OCI Part 7 - Storage and Networking.
• OCI Part 8 - Capacity Types.
• OCI Part 9 - OCI VMware Solution (OVCS).
• OCI Part 10 - Planning for OCI - How much should you spend?

Without further ado, let's get started.

OCI Part 1 - Where to Begin.

Navigating OCI can be daunting at first. Whether you are being led through the process by Oracle or an Oracle partner/reseller, or through another party, I strongly advise all of my clients to have a firm understanding of the key contractual and technical aspects of OCI. Remember - the move to OCI straddles technical and non-technical/contractual topics.

In my experience, the following three resources, when assessed together, should give you everything you need to know about OCI and play a helpful role in your OCI migration plan.?

1. The Oracle PaaS and IaaS Universal Credits Service Descriptions?document. This document defines pretty every key contractual term you should know and understand as part of your OCI planning. This includes all service descriptions and metric definitions, along with clear documentation on pre-requisite and optional OCI service components. The document also ties in the exact OCI part numbers.
2. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation?technical documentation. While this is meant for the technical reader, it contains lots of important details on technical requirements and options, and allows correlation with the contractual definitions in the preceding document.
3. Oracle Cloud Price List. Easy reference for the full price list. It's worth noting that OCI prices are the same globally, across all regions.?

Also useful is the Cloud Cost Estimator. While this is not a comprehensive planning tool, and is just an estimator tool - as its name suggests - it can give you a basic understanding of the costs in OCI. I found the tool to be clunky and not suitable for any serious OCI cost planning; it's a rudimentary tool at best.

Stay tuned for more articles on Oracle Cloud infrastructure.

In the meantime, if you need any assistance with detailed and methodical migration planning to OCI, and need any help with pricing and forecasting, we can help. As part of our process, we perform a detailed, server-by-server scan and analysis, then map it to an optimized destination in OCI, with detailed price breakouts. This way, you can have a precise cost assessment for OCI (your expected OCI spend in year 1) and your technical team will have a cost-optimized blueprint for moving to OCI.

As always, feel free to contact us for a complimentary consultation. Contact Us.