Item: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Rating: 8
Author: David Williams

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for public cloud compute, storage, and database resources, to host web applications and to perform business intelligence, data engineering, and data warehousing.

More specifically, we have over 100 retail outlets with individual point-of-sale and medical dispense applications and their data, and use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to aid us in aggregating data for corporate reporting, for analysing and mining data, and also for managing promotional pricing back to stores.

Pros and Cons

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has a generous free tier, moreso than other hyperscalers, with an always-free tier that guarantees certain products are always free
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure allows you to size VMs with differing combinations of CPU and RAM, which is contrary to other hyperscalers that have specific pre-defined combinations only
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure regularly provides free certification exam offers

This may be kind of obvious, but Oracle Cloud Infrastructure favours Oracle's own database products and there is limited opportunity to use, say, SQL Server as a serverless/managed database product. Thus if you use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure but want a non-Oracle DB you may need to run it on your own VM or migrate to something else
Other hyperscalers, such as GCP, have a greater focus/emphasis on AI and models, and this is something Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is not yet as well-established in
Other hyperscalers, such as Azure, have greater unification around its data/BI products and tools than Oracle Cloud Infrastructure currently has

Return on Investment

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has allowed us to manage data at scale with a low barrier to entry
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has allowed us to create experiments and proof of concepts with little risk
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has allowed us to reduce costs we were spending on other cloud providers

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform

While AWS and Azure are more mature than Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, we felt Oracle Cloud Infrastructure had a lower barrier to entry with a greater range of always-free services. It also provides free certification opportunities periodically which incentivised our engineers to take the training and exams. Additionally, when we need to scale up a machine's RAM we can do so without also having to scale up CPU and thus we achieved cost benefits on certain machine shapes.

Key Insights

Do you think Oracle Cloud Infrastructure delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure's feature set?

Yes

Did Oracle Cloud Infrastructure live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Oracle Cloud Infrastructure again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Snowflake, Confluent Platform

Likelihood to Recommend

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is well-suited for organisations that use the Oracle database and can benefit from a fully autonomous/self-healing/self-patching database engine.

Additionally, it is well-suited for any organisation that may require non-standard machine types - such as small CPU but lots of RAM, or vice-versa, because you can create your own machine shapes.

Further, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is well-suited for companies that want to get into the cloud and are concerned by costs because Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has a generous always-free tier that provides for some small machines and databases at no cost. For small web apps it's a no-brainer, really.

However, where Oracle Cloud Infrastructure may be well less-suited is if you have a mature, expert engineering team who are, say, Microsoft-focused or with a lot of AWS experience because there may be a learning curve to get up to speed on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

If you're not using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you should check it out - it's no cost, risk-free, and may surprise you

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure