Industry’s most generous free tier gives developers four Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB Always Free to build Arm-based apps on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
OCI Ampere A1 platform supported by investments in leading open source projects porting to Arm for efficiency and price-performance
Bengaluru, NFAPost: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) recently unlocked the power of arm-based processors by launching Ampere Altra A1 Compute Platform making deep impact among enterprise clients and developers.
According to Arvian Research, OCI launch of Ampere Altra A1 Compute Platform is a disruptive moement in computing history. “The platform provides the industry’s first 80-core Arm server at only $0.01 per core hour, with flexible sizing from 1-80 OCPUs and 1-64 GB of memory per core,” said Arvian Research.
To fuel Arm®-based application development, Oracle announced a range of tools, solutions, and support including its first Arm-based compute offering, OCI Ampere A1 Compute.
Available on OCI, Oracle will be the only major cloud provider to offer its Arm compute instances. It is the industry’s lowest cost per core and with flexible VM sizing allowing it to be customized based on memory and core requirements. So now customers can run cloud-native and general-purpose workloads on Arm instances with significant price-performance benefits.
Modern application
Oracle Senior Vice President, Technology and Customer Strategy, Asia Pacific & Japan Chris Chelliah said 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,” said Chris Chelliah.
OCI is the second cloud provider after AWS to offer Arm instances. Rather than designing its own Arm server CPU, OCI is working with CPU design startup Ampere to design industry leading Arm-based server chip Ampere Altra. Besides enabling OCI in its cloud servers, Ampere Altra server chip is also help customers to put it in their own datacenters.
Ampere Computing founder chairman and CEO Ampere Renee James said 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.
Developer cloud
“The Oracle dev cloud has all the tools developers need to try new technology, get excited about new platforms and develop new applications,” said Renee James.
Arm Senior Vice President and GM, Infrastructure Line of Business Chris Bergey said 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.
“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,” said Chris Bergey.
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% performance increase, and up to a 62% price-performance benefit compared to x86 based systems.
What Partners and Analysts are Saying
IDC Research Director, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group Kuba Stolarski said the Oracle-Ampere collaboration has resulted in a compelling Arm-based platform for developers and enterprises alike.
“With low entry cost, variable deployment size and the ability to deploy in the public cloud or on premises with Cloud@Customer, the A1 Compute instance offers the best mix of long-term scalability and near-term accessibility,” said Kuba Stolarski.
As the Arm ecosystem continues to develop, Kuba Stolarski said the breadth of deployments and use cases will only continue to grow with it, enabling further adoption of Arm-based infrastructure. “The A1 instance is a great first step for OCI towards bringing that future forward,” said Kuba Stolarski.
