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Oracle runs OCI Ops Insights on Oracle Autonomous Database
OCI Ops Insights Cloud Service uses over 1,000 instances of Oracle Autonomous Database for better performance, while reducing costs.
“Using Oracle Autonomous Database enables us to manage over 1,000 databases across all OCI regions with no dedicated administrative headcount. OCI Ops Insights Cloud Service has also been able to achieve per-tenant-level predictable performance and immensely improve data security by isolating each tenant’s data to dedicated Autonomous Data Warehouse instances. Managing such a large number of databases across regions would have been impossible without Autonomous Database technology.”
Business challenges
Oracle customers with many databases can spend a lot of time and money trying to manage performance needs and accurately plan for future resources. Customers look to tools like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Ops Insights to help. Easily accessible from the OCI console, Ops Insights is a cloud native service that helps IT teams analyze resource use, forecast future demand, and identify patterns and trends across the entire enterprise. IT operations and database administration teams can ingest monitoring and SQL data from a varied set of sources. In the cloud, this includes Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Exadata Cloud Service, while on-premises sources include Oracle Exadata, Oracle Database, and Oracle Enterprise Manager repositories. All this data is used to create a secure lake house for analysis of database and infrastructure performance and resource use.
Why Oracle chose Autonomous Database
When the development team was tasked with modernizing OCI Ops Insights, there were two key problems to address.
First, the previous application used a single Oracle Exadata system to store all the needed data for analysis. This setup required a dedicated administration team of around 10 people, an ongoing cost that was not in the budget.
In addition, that single resource was shared by all users. This meant that rapid growth in the number of users, or one customer placing an unexpected heavy load on the system, could slow response times for others.
To address these issues when moving to the cloud, the development team decided to use Oracle Autonomous Database for analytics and data warehousing rather than Exadata Cloud Service.
Results
Oracle Autonomous Database requires no dedicated administration resources, so it provided significant ongoing cost savings. In practice, this meant that the team could focus on high-priority development work and accelerate the project.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, the absence of administration costs enabled an architectural change. Rather than the previous single shared infrastructure for all users, customers receive their own dedicated database instance, sized to meet their needs, and able to scale on demand without impacting anybody else. This eliminated the problem of “noisy neighbors” and ensured a consistent SLA. As a further bonus, the isolation between customer databases simplified the process of meeting the security requirements of both the customer and Oracle’s own cloud security experts.
Today the team is responsible for more than 1,000 databases with no dedicated admin headcount, something that is possible only with Oracle Autonomous Database. It uses advanced forecasting algorithms, combined with the easy scaling capability of Autonomous Database, to ensure that all customers always have the resources they need. Thanks to using a dedicated database, each customer gets an improved, more consistent SLA and a stronger security story.