Over the last few days, in this pre-Holiday season period, Oracle has released a number of interesting new services and updates to existing services. I plan on exploring them in more detail in the coming weeks.
(note: the illustration is courtesy of StableDiffusion – using the prompt “a painting of oracle corporation under a christmas tree in a realistic, black and white style”)
Here are some of the highlights:
- new: Container Instances: you want to run a (single or multi) container workload; you do not need the overhead (and power) of Kubernetes. Run this container image for me is the instruction you want to give – and have it running just like that. That is basically the promise of Container Instances – a container managing layer on top of OCI VM that provides a self service and serverless container run offering. (Oracle compares it to Azure Container Instances and finds it is over 3 times cheaper as well as able to provide 10X more capacity for individual workloads). Note: it is new and it is also a reappearance of sorts of the Application Container Cloud – one of my favorite offerings on Oracle Cloud Classic.
- new: Queue: a simple, straightforward FIFO queue. You publish one or more messages. You can specific a time to live or except the queue default). Consumers can come and poll the queue for new messages. When they do, they get the message(s) that have been on the queue for the longest. Each message is handed to only one consumer. The consumer has to inform the queue of successful processing of the message; if it does not, the message become available again for consumption. After a configurable number of consumption-and-processing attempts, the message is moved to a Dead Letter Queue from whence it can be “manually” processed. Producers and consumers are completely unaware of each other. Oh, and the first 1M messages per month are free.
- new: Document Understanding: a new AI powered service (not quite ChatGPT, but still interesting) – Document Understanding can process unstructured (images of) documents in various formats and extract text and structured data from them, making them available in JSON result documents. For example scan invoices and extract relevant structured information. Read this blog for more details.
- update: API Gateway can now easily perform OAuth2 and OpenID Connect authentication of tokens in requests (through an external identity provider) –
- update: Resource Manager can create a Stack from a Terraform definition stored in OCI DevOps Code Repo. Now that I am typing this I wonder why this is added only now. Was that not supported before? Glad I never noticed.
- update: GoldenGate: OCI GoldenGate now supports PostgreSQL as a deployment type – in addition to Oracle Database, MySQL and (Oracle) Big Data.
