OCI

OCI#

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is Oracle’s second-generation public cloud, built around running Oracle’s database stack on Oracle-owned hardware. The operator meets it on enterprise estates with existing Oracle licenses, on workloads where Exadata or autonomous database matter, and on government tenants that need OCI’s compliance posture.

Account model#

  • Tenancy, the top-level account.

  • Compartment, the in-tenancy isolation unit (a hierarchical grouping, more flexible than an AWS Account; an operator can carve dev / stage / prod inside one tenancy).

  • User / Group / Policy, OCI IAM. Policies are written in a simple DSL: allow group <g> to <verb> <resource> in compartment <c>.

Catalog at a glance#

Layer

Headline services

Compute

Compute (VMs and bare metal), OKE (Kubernetes), Functions (Fn), Container Instances.

Storage

Object Storage, Block Volume, File Storage, Archive.

Database

Autonomous Database (Oracle’s flagship), Exadata Cloud, MySQL HeatWave, NoSQL Database.

Networking

VCN, Load Balancer, DRG, FastConnect, Service Gateway.

Identity

IAM Identity Domains (the modern auth surface), Vault, OS Management.

Observability

Logging, Monitoring, APM, Application Performance Monitoring.

AI / ML

Generative AI Service (Cohere, Llama), Data Science, AI Vision / Language / Speech.

CLI and SDKs#

The oci CLI plus language SDKs (oci for Python, oci-go-sdk).

$ oci setup config                          # interactive setup
$ oci iam compartment list --all
$ oci compute instance list -c <compartment-ocid>
$ oci os bucket list -ns <namespace>
$ oci ce cluster list -c <compartment-ocid>

The oci CLI is verbose; --all and --query (JMESPath) help keep one-liners readable.

Regions and ADs#

OCI uses “Availability Domains” for what AWS calls Availability Zones. Some regions have one AD, some have three; high-availability patterns vary by region. Cross-region replication is supported on Object Storage and Autonomous Database.

Pricing model#

  • Pay-as-you-go is standard.

  • Universal Credits are pre-paid pools usable across services with discount tiers.

  • Always Free Tier is genuinely free (and indefinite) for a small slice: 2 AMD VMs, 200GB Block Volume, 10GB Object Storage, 1 Autonomous Database. Useful for labs.

  • Egress has a 10 TB / month free allowance; beyond, lower per-GB than AWS.

When to pick OCI#

  • Existing Oracle Database workloads where Autonomous Database or Exadata Cloud is the migration target.

  • Workloads where egress pricing matters and the team can live with the smaller catalog.

  • Government tenants needing OCI’s specific accreditations.

When to pick something else#

  • Greenfield workloads with no Oracle-specific dependency, default to AWS / GCP / Azure for ecosystem.

  • When third-party Terraform modules, Helm charts, and operator patterns matter; many assume one of the big three.

Datacenter locations#

Code

Location

af-casablanca-1

Casablanca, Morocco

af-johannesburg-1

Johannesburg, South Africa

ap-batam-1

Batam, Indonesia

ap-chuncheon-1

Chuncheon, South Korea

ap-hyderabad-1

Hyderabad, India

ap-kulai-2

Kulai, Malaysia

ap-melbourne-1

Melbourne, Australia

ap-mumbai-1

Mumbai, India

ap-osaka-1

Osaka, Japan

ap-seoul-1

Seoul, South Korea

ap-singapore-1

Singapore

ap-singapore-2

Singapore West

ap-sydney-1

Sydney, Australia

ap-tokyo-1

Tokyo, Japan

ca-montreal-1

Montreal, Canada

ca-toronto-1

Toronto, Canada

eu-amsterdam-1

Amsterdam, Netherlands

eu-frankfurt-1

Frankfurt, Germany

eu-jovanovac-1

Jovanovac, Serbia

eu-madrid-1

Madrid, Spain

eu-madrid-3

Madrid, Spain

eu-marseille-1

Marseille, France

eu-milan-1

Milan, Italy

eu-paris-1

Paris, France

eu-stockholm-1

Stockholm, Sweden

eu-turin-1

Turin, Italy

eu-zurich-1

Zurich, Switzerland

il-jerusalem-1

Jerusalem, Israel

me-abudhabi-1

Abu Dhabi, UAE

me-dubai-1

Dubai, UAE

me-jeddah-1

Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

me-riyadh-1

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

mx-monterrey-1

Monterrey, Mexico

mx-queretaro-1

Querétaro, Mexico

sa-bogota-1

Bogota, Colombia

sa-santiago-1

Santiago, Chile

sa-saopaulo-1

São Paulo, Brazil

sa-valparaiso-1

Valparaiso, Chile

sa-vinhedo-1

Vinhedo, Brazil

uk-cardiff-1

Newport, United Kingdom

uk-london-1

London, United Kingdom

us-ashburn-1

Ashburn, Virginia, USA

us-chicago-1

Chicago, Illinois, USA

us-phoenix-1

Phoenix, Arizona, USA

us-sanjose-1

San Jose, California, USA

References#

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