Oracle announces first Arm-based cloud offering

Servers
(Image credit: Shutterstock / Timofeev Vladimir)

Oracle’s infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud computing offering has rolled out its first Arm-based service charged at just one cent per core per hour.

A part of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the new offering is powered by the Arm-based Ampere Altra processors. 

Thanks to the low price point, Oracle suggests that the new OCI Ampere Altra A1 compute service enables OCI customers to run their workloads on Arm-based instances with significant price-performance benefits. 

“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 OCI’s executive vice president, Clay Magouyrk.

Supporting the ecosystem

Users can consume the new Ampere A1 Compute service either as virtual machines (VM) with up to 80 and soon as bare metal instances with up to 160, with ample resource sizing flexibility.

Oracle has also partnered with Ampere, Arm, GitLab, Jenkins, and others to help accelerate the Arm developer ecosystem.

The new offering is available in three tiers, including a free tier that gives developers four Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB memory for free.

“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 Ampere’s founder and CEO, Renee James.

Ampere Altra, the low-power cloud processor based on Arm’s Neoverse N1 platform, has raked up decent reviews since its launch, and has helped propel Ampere, the relatively new entrant to the data center processor game, right up there with the big boys, AMD and Intel.

Mayank Sharma

With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’s TechRadar Pro’s expert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.