AUSTIN, Texas, May 25, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- To help
customers and developers take advantage of Arm®
technology, Oracle is providing tools, solutions, and support to
fuel Arm-based application development. Oracle today also announced
that its first Arm-based compute offering, OCI Ampere A1 Compute,
is available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Now,
customers can run cloud-native and general-purpose workloads on
Arm-based instances with significant price-performance benefits.
Oracle is the only major cloud provider offering Arm-based compute
instances at only one cent per core
hour, the industry's lowest cost per core, with flexible VM sizing
from 1 to 80 OCPUs and 1 to 64 GB of memory per core or as a
bare-metal service with 160 cores and 1 TB of memory. Customers can
now deploy Arm-optimized applications on containers, bare metal
servers, and virtual machines in the Oracle public cloud, or
Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer.
"We see increasing demand for server-side Arm computing and
adding Arm-based compute instances to our extensive portfolio of
offerings enables customers to pick and choose the right processors
for their workloads," said Clay
Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure. "Now customers who need an Arm platform for
development can get the flexibility, scalability, and
price-performance they need. We're also making it really easy for
developers to move their apps and develop new ones on Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure."
"Ampere 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, founder,
chairman and CEO, Ampere Computing. "The Oracle Cloud has all the
tools developers need to try new technology, get excited about new
platforms and develop new applications."
"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,"
said Chris Bergey, SVP and GM,
Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. "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."
New Arm Accelerator Program, Oracle Cloud Free Tier, and App
Development Ecosystem
Oracle is investing in the Arm ecosystem, providing developers
with more choice in compute instances and superior
price-performance compared to any other x86 instance on a per core
basis. Three distinct offerings are available to developers to get
started on OCI. With Oracle Cloud Free Tier, developers receive
US$300 in free credits for 30 days.
The Always Free Arm access gives developers four Ampere A1 cores
and 24 GB memory – one of the industry's most generous offerings.
Lastly, with the newly launched Arm Accelerator program, open
source developers, ISV partners, customers and universities with
Arm-based development projects that need more resources beyond what
the Oracle Cloud Free Tier provides, can apply to receive Oracle
Cloud credits for a 12-month period.
Oracle's development stack is available on Ampere A1 instances,
including Oracle Linux, Java, MySQL, GraalVM, and the Oracle
Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) service. To make it easy for
developers to get started, Oracle created an Oracle Linux Cloud
Developer image which enables customers to install, configure, and
launch a development environment that includes OCI client tools,
utilities, and common programming languages such as Java, GraalVM,
Python, PHP, Node.js, Go and C/C++. The developer image is easily
accessible and can be deployed from the OCI console.
To help customers take advantage of the latest in Arm
technology, Oracle is working closely with a wide variety of
technology and open source partners, such as GitLab, Jenkins,
Rancher, Datadog, OnSpecta, NGINX, and Genymobile. To help grow and
enrich the Arm developer ecosystem, Oracle also announced that it
is joining the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), an open
source, vendor-neutral community for sustaining the fastest growing
CI/CD open source projects.
New Ampere® Altra® 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 their workloads. Now customers can more precisely build
their virtual machines to match workload requirements, so they can
get the best performance while optimizing costs. These compute
shapes are truly general purpose and suitable for running 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. These shapes offer
balanced performance and an optimal price point for cloud-based
scale-out workloads, such as NGINX and web applications.
- In-memory Caches and Databases: From databases to
analytics, Arm processors deliver predictable performance for
databases such as Redis and MySQL. Memory-heavy workloads and
multithreaded applications such as in-memory databases and
key-value stores, experience superior performance.
- Mobile Application Development: Ampere Altra's high core
count (up to 160) is ideal for the density and scale needed for
mobile application development and testing. In addition, developing
iOS or Android-based applications on the OCI Ampere A1 Compute
eliminates the need for an emulator or nested virtualization,
leading to superior performance.
- 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 such as AI/ML inferencing, media
transcoding, and running HPC stacks like CFD, WRF, OPENFAM,
GROMACS, BLAST, BeeGFS, and NAMD.
Powered by Ampere Altra processors, the OCI Ampere A1 Compute is
the only flexible Arm-based virtual machine shape in the industry
that can be customized based on memory and core requirements.
It is one of the industry's first penny-core server in the
cloud at only $0.01 per core per hour
and $0.0015 per GB of RAM per hour.
Ampere's choice of using a single threaded core, plus sustained
3.0Ghz maximum frequency, results in linear scaling with respect to
the cores. This means performance-per-core scales well as the core
count increases, helping ensure customers get exactly what they pay
for. Ampere's Altra processors can run all cores at the maximum
frequency, ensuring that each A1 core offers predictable
performance. In addition, the cores are completely isolated from
the noisy neighbor impact of other workloads running on the same
processor. Each core is single threaded by design with its own 64
KB L1 I-cache, 64 KB L1 D-cache and a huge one MB L2 D-cache. This
helps ensure as much isolation as possible and guarantees
predictable performance. The single threaded design also ensures
that each thread has its own core and its own resources,
eliminating the potential core sharing thread-security issues that
have been demonstrated recently. The OCI Ampere A1 Compute shapes
are available as both virtual machines up to 80 cores and bare
metal instances up to 160 cores.
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 percent
performance increase, and up to a 62 percent price-performance
benefit compared to x86 based systems.
What Customers, Analysts and Partners are Saying
"In our research, we need quick access to the
latest computing technologies to help us solve complex
scientific problems at breakneck speed. With Oracle
Cloud Infrastructure, we have gained early access to
the latest Arm-based Ampere A1 Compute to get
the superior performance and power efficiencies needed to
scale our high performance computing workloads instantly. In
terms of performance per dollar and in terms of cost, it gets
even more compelling, which is very exciting," said
Simon McIntosh-Smith, Head of the
HPC Research Group, Department of Computer
Science, University of Bristol.
"Heterogeneous computing is the next front for Cloud Service
Providers. As customers shift to cloud native approaches for their
performance intensive computing applications, they will no doubt
increase their investment in Arm-based instances from such
providers. Oracle's announcement on Arm-powered instances for OCI
and Cloud@Customer is a timely move to tap into companies in the
midst of this shift," said Ashish
Nadkarni, GVP, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and
Technologies Group, IDC.
"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. As the Arm ecosystem continues to develop, 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, Research Director, Infrastructure Systems,
Platforms and Technologies Group, IDC.
"The need to optimize applications so they can deliver price,
performance, and energy efficiency has seen attention shift from
x86 to Arm-based processors. OCI with the Ampere Arm offering
provides choice to Oracle customers, and the free for life offering
is ideal for developers to use. With 4 cores and 24 GB RAM,
developers have a really usable free offering for AI/ML training
use cases," said Roy Illsley, Chief
Analyst, Omdia.
"Arm-based wafers are ten times the volume of any other chip
design, which drives the fabrication learning curve quicker, makes
the processors faster and lower power, and dramatically lowers the
cost of compute. In addition, Arm has developed many different
types of specialized SoC processors which can perform over ten
times faster for specialized workloads," said David Floyer, CTO and Co-Founder, Wikibon. "The
Ampere A1 Compute processor is designed for cloud providers with
hundreds of cores with consistent performance easily shared between
large numbers of users. Oracle has migrated its OCI codebase and
tools to Arm. A small investment by users to migrate and test their
applications will lead to 20 percent plus faster performance and 40
percent plus lower price-performance – one
cent per core hour. Wikibon recommends OCI users try it out
on their high-cost workloads."
"We at CDF believe that Jenkins adding support for the new
Ampere A1 Compute offering on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is an
important step forward. Jenkins automation support for the new Arm
architecture on OCI will jumpstart the development of Arm native
applications and drive more innovation," said Tracy Miranda, executive director, Continuous
Delivery Foundation. "Support of Jenkins on Oracle Cloud's Intel,
AMD, and Arm compute shapes is an example of Oracle's laser-like
focus on meeting customer requirements."
"The Ampere A1 Compute platform on OCI with Genymotion gives
developers the ability to build, test and deploy natively all on
the same infrastructure. It provides better accuracy, performance,
code coverage, and density of virtual devices on servers. We
believe so strongly in the value proposition of Arm-based servers
that we ported Genymotion software to Arm over a year ago.
Genymotion customers who are using our platform for sales,
demonstrations, VMI, gaming and social
media use cases could experience a performance increase, in some
cases as much as 10x, using OCI Arm-based Ampere A1 compute
shapes," said Tim Danford, CEO, Genymobile.
"We're happy to announce the availability of Jenkins automation
software on the Ampere A1 Compute platform for building, deploying,
and automating projects on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure," said
Olivier Vernin, Infrastructure Officer, Jenkins. "Now developers
can use Jenkins and start building the next generation of
applications easily on the latest Arm-based processors in Oracle
Cloud."
"We are excited to announce that GitLab has extended and added
CI/CD support for Arm Ampere A1 Compute shapes. Teams using Oracle
Cloud can now easily deploy GitLab using the 'Deploy to Oracle
Cloud' button, allowing developers to quickly build and deploy
applications on both Arm and x86 platforms," said Mayank
Tahilramani, director of partnerships and alliances at GitLab.
"With this capability and using the Always Free Arm on Oracle
Cloud, customers can easily gain access to a cloud environment to
build, test, and run continuous integration and deployment of
Arm-based applications for as long as they want."
"NGINX Plus for Arm-based deployments just got a lot easier.
Developers using OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances can now quickly
deploy NGINX Plus on both Arm and x86 platforms," said Stuart Shader, senior manager, business
development, NGINX. "With this capability and using the Always Free
Arm on OCI, customers can gain access to a cloud environment to
deploy NGINX Plus Arm-based applications for as long as they
want."
"GitHub Actions provides developers powerful, flexible, secure
automation right in GitHub. We are excited to work with Oracle to
bring choice to developers by ensuring GitHub Actions is supported
for the OCI Ampere A1 Compute platform. GitHub Actions
runners support Arm architectures, and we are
encouraged to see partners like Oracle validate this technology to
bring GitHub Actions to more developers and teams,"
said Joe Bourne, director, product management,
GitHub.
"Customers are increasingly demanding multi-architecture support
within the cloud-native environments—Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
introduces innovation with Arm on this front. Our goal is to
extend our Arm support even deeper with the new release of SUSE
Rancher by adding support for provisioning multi-arch OKE
clusters. When it comes to Arm, we simply want to say yes to
most use cases—including Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, on premises
or at the edge with Oracle Cloud Hybrid options," said Keith Basil, vice president, product and cloud
native infrastructure, SUSE.
"OnSpecta offers a Deep Learning Software Inference Engine (DLS)
which optimizes and accelerates the performance of a customer's
Oracle Cloud Inference Instance when deployed on Ampere Computing
Servers up to 10x. The Ampere A1 Compute platform is a great fit
for AI inference workloads because its Arm-based architecture
delivers superior performance per watt of power, resulting in a
meaningfully lower total cost of ownership. Oracle cloud
inferences, powered by Ampere Altra servers with OnSpecta's
inference engine deliver 3x the cost performance of Graviton and 2x
the cost performance of Intel x86," said Indra Mohan, CEO,
OnSpecta.
"We're excited to extend Datadog support to the new OCI
Ampere A1 Compute shapes on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. We've
seen a growing number of Datadog customers choose the Arm platform
to improve application performance and lower costs,"
said Jimmy Caputo, director, product management, Datadog.
"With the Datadog Agent for Ampere A1 on OCI, Oracle
customers can use Datadog to determine the best shapes for their
workloads, track migrations from other compute platforms, and get a
unified view into the health and performance of their
environment."
"We chose OCI Ampere A1 for the enormous processing power it
gives API AutoFlow, which allows our customers to run an unlimited
number of microservices, transform data in real-time, and expose
them through custom APIs," said Peter
Jung, Chief Product Officer, Interactor.
"Elotl is obsessed with enabling enterprises to consume
right-sized cost-effective compute for Kubernetes applications. We
are thrilled to see the arrival of the OCI Ampere A1
Compute in the cloud compute market! The Ampere A1
Compute provides a fantastic low-cost, high-performant
commodity compute option for our customers like Ronin - we cannot
wait to put them to use," said Madhuri Yechuri, Founder and
CEO, Elotl Inc.
"Ronin is working to significantly impact cancer treatment with
data. We must take advantage of all healthcare-specific
cloud-agnostic IaaS and PaaS offerings as they become available. We
are thrilled to see Oracle's newly released faster and cheaper
Ampere A1 Compute instances and the ability to use these
effortlessly via the Elotl interface," said Denali Lumma, vice
president, Engineering, Project Ronin.
"Canoncial's Anbox Cloud solution now benefits from the
performance and density associated with the new Oracle Cloud
Infrastructure Ampere A1 Compute instances. Ubuntu is now also
available on the Ampere A1 instances. We're excited to see Oracle
take part in the expansion of the developer ecosystem and it's
great news, as running hundreds of Android containers for
automation use cases just became so much easier and cost
effective," said Regis Paquette,
vice president, Global Alliances, Public Cloud and Channels,
Canonical.
About Oracle
Oracle offers integrated suites of
applications plus secure, autonomous infrastructure in the Oracle
Cloud. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), please visit
us at oracle.com.
Additional Resources
- Watch the Oracle Live with Clay
Magouyrk
- Read the Moor Insights and Strategy whitepaper
- Learn more about OCI Ampere A1 Compute from Clay Magouyrk
- Get started with OCI Ampere A1 Compute for developers
- Learn how to set up and run a free Minecraft server in the
Cloud
- Learn more about Arm on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
- Learn more about the Arm Accelerator Program and Always Free
Arm
Trademarks
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trademarks of Oracle Corporation.
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