Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Infrastructure and Platform as a Services 

Oracle Cloud is the industry's broadest and most integrated cloud provider, with deployment options ranging from the public cloud to your data center. Oracle Cloud offers best-in-class services across Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). 

Oracle Cloud is one of the few cloud providers that can offer a complete set of cloud services to meet all your enterprise computing needs. 

Use Oracle Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings to quickly set up the virtual machines, storage, and networking capabilities you need to run just about any kind of workload. Your infrastructure is managed, hosted, and supported by Oracle. 

Use Oracle Platform as a Service offerings to provision ready-to-use environments for your enterprise IT and development teams, so they can build and deploy applications, based on proven Oracle databases and application servers. 

Use Oracle Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings to run your business from the Cloud. Oracle offers cloud-based solutions for Human Capital Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Supply Chain Management, and many other applications, all managed, hosted, and supported by Oracle. 

Offered for free 30 days or equivalent to 400 SGD (Singapore Dollar) or 300USD (US Dollar). Create free account on Oracle Try IT portal. During account creation you will be required to enter your account name, user name & address details. Please note Cloud Account Name is critical and unique to individual or company so specify name which can be easily referred or identified.  

 

 

 

Provide mobile number on which you can receive verification code. Once specified click on Request Code button to receive verification code. Validate this in order to proceed with further steps. 

 

 

Next step is critical as this requires Credit or Debit card information. Please note that your subscription will remain free and until you select option for Upgrade nothing will be charged from your account. There will be though nominal amount Debit and Credit will occur as part of account verification during account creation process. 

 

 

Last step is to acknowledge terms and condition and once agreed click on Complete button. 

 

Post completion you will receive confirmation email with account details including temporary password. Login to URL (Let’s call it Cloud Console Page) provided using credentials provided and change password on first login. If password change is successful you can use Cloud console page to login using updated credentials and you will be LIVE on Oracle Cloud page as shown below. 

 

 

 

Explore Services offered within Oracle Cloud 

Let’s explore services offered within Oracle Cloud. On Cloud console page you will see different kind of resources and information available. Let’s start with navigation menu on left side of screen. When you click on Navigation Menu, you will be able to see following important components within Oracle cloud. 

 

Click on Dashboard and you will be provided with available services and credit in your account. If you notice bottom screen no services are shown which is due to no services are initiated or created yet under this account. 

 

 

We can come back to creation of services later. Let’s go back to Navigation Menu and click on Services. Here you will find services offered by Oracle Cloud in form of Infrastructure as a Service or Platform as a Service. 

 

 

Let’s go back to Navigation Menu and now select Monitoring. You will see no monitoring data available which is due to no services are currently associated with this account. 

 

Okay – now go back to Navigation Menu and now click on Users. You will find all users currently part of this Oracle Cloud account. Well, only one you see because currently we have only one user who is owner of Oracle Cloud account created in above steps.  

 

 

Click on Groups tab in Users screen and you will find existing groups available. If you notice OCI_Administrators is meant for admin only and hence ensure this group is not assigned to everyone. As and when you start using available Oracle Services, you will see more groups are getting created. 

 

 

Okay – I hope now we have enough details about navigation and available resources. Let’s circle back and go to Dashboard page. Here you will find Account Management tab – click on it. 

 

 

Here you go – very critical and definite information everyone looking for when using Cloud service – how much I used and how much I will be paying? Don’t worry – so long you are under Cloud promotion which is valid for 30 days (or 400SGD/300USD) none will be charged. You will be changed only when YOU choose to Upgrade Cloud account to paid service. Isn’t this relieving!  

 

 

Other tab offers similar useful details. Such as what Cloud services I can avail under free subscription, can I buy (activate) more services than available to my account and details of admin accounts. Do explore them to get these details. 

Can we have some Demo – YES! 

Let’s try creating one service instance. For this go back to Dashboard page and click on Create Instance tab. 

 

For this demo – let’s create one Compute instance. Click on Create button under Compute service. 

 

This will take you to respective data center Cloud page and prompt for Compartment. Select the one you have available free under this account and Click on Confirm button. 

 

Good – now we have many more information to filled in. Let’s go for them one by one. 

Name you instance – give some meaningful name with which you can recognize your instance. For example, you may want to name instance as DEV, UAT, Prod if you are creating server instance for specific project need. 

 

Select availability domain – only one can be selected. 

 

Choose operating system which will be setup on Compute instance. Notice that you have choice to change image source which provides abundant source images per your need. Explore more, if required. 

 

Choose instance type among Physical or Virtual options provided. For this demo am restricting myself to Virtual machine. 

 

Choose instance shape in terms of various factors such as CPU, Memory etc. Click on Change Shape to find out other available shapes. For free version you will not get many choices hence am restricting this demo to one available by default. 

 

 

Default boot volume size specific to free version will provided. This is upper limit and in case of one feel to lower it down then can choose Custom boot volume option. For this demo will go with default boot volume size. 

 

Use Putty Key Generator or other available tools/utility in market to generate public and private key files.  Provide public key file under add SSH key section. 

 

 

Just for reference 

 

 

Under networking section, give some meaningful name to Virtual Private Cloud.  

 

 

Well – now go ahead and click on Create button at the bottom of the page. If all goes well, you will get following screen confirming compute instance is getting provisioned. 

 

 

In few seconds – you will have your first compute instance ready. Congratulations! 

Here you will find compute instance specific details per your configurations and you can update/modify resources as per need. The one information which is important for this demo is IP address of compute instance. Make a note of Public Ip address which we will use to connect compute instance via PuTTy. 

 

 

 

Open PuTTy and provide public IP address along with private key file (generated in prior steps) to connect to your first compute instance. 

 

Since you are connected why not do some changes on OS. Let’s update available OS packages per latest available release. Just switch user to root and run package upgrade using ‘yum update’ command. 

 

Once done – let’s try something more and install say Docker engine. 

 

Let us verify whether docker installed correctly. 

 

 

We can install/configure different set of applications based on need as well as availability of resources on machine. Please note that compute instance serves IaaS service and hence once procured all maintenance & support activity will be handled by end user/Customer. Oracle will only be available in case of any problem with hardware or data center noticed. Most importantly security aspect such as who can access machine, firewall configurations, VPN access etc. lies with end user/Customer. 

 

 

WAIT we are not done yet – let’s explore more on other available services. 

Let’s try creating one more service instance. For this go back to Dashboard page and click on Create Instance tab. 

 

For this demo – let’s create one database instance. Click on Create button under database service. 

 

 

This will take you to new page showing Launch DB System button under existing compartment which was already created during compute instance creation. Click on Launch DB System button. 

 

Here we need to supply various details in order to launch DB instance. Let’s enter them one by one. 

Give some unique name under DISPLAY NAME and select desired Availability Domain from drop-down. 

 

Select Shape type among available options – we chose VM for this demo. Once selected you will find different available SHAPE. Select one which best fit for your requirement. For this demo we went with VM Standard2.2 with total node count as 1. 

 

Select Oracle database edition and required storage. We went with EE and 256GB. 

 

Based on available license at your end select appropriate option. 

 

Provide public key file details. Here we chose same key file which used during compute instance creation. 

 

Enter VPC details along with available subnet. Give unique hostname and available domain name. 

 

Let’s provide database detail. Based on version you will be asked to provide different details. 

 

Select database type based on Workload. We are going with OLTP for this demo. 

 

If all goes well, you will see following screen post hitting Launch DB System button. 

 

This will take some time to process and post completion following screen shows confirmed instance. 

 

Now you can connect to instance using Public IP and private key file via PuTTY. 

 

 

  

 

How about PaaS – can we demonstrate one?  Yes! 

Let’s focus on PaaS services offered by Oracle Cloud. For this demo we will create Oracle Autonomous Analytics instance. Open Cloud console and go to Navigation Menu. From here click on Services and then click on Autonomous Analytics – which will bring you to following page. 

 

 

Let’s begin - click on Create Instance button. Please note the PaaS product requires separate license and so select which is suitable in your case. For specific to this demo we chose BYOL (bring your own license). 

 

Review information provided and click on Create button. 

 

This will take about 20minutes to create instance.  

 

Once successful you can view status as shown below.