Today, organizations are actively implementing containers to develop and run applications in the cloud. For example, Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE), a managed Kubernetes service, is widely used by OCI customers to run containers on an industrial scale. When customers need to run a containerized application and don't want to use the Kubernetes platform, they can use a virtual machine, install a container runtime environment and run the application on it. But this process still adds operational complexity because you need to manage the virtual machines and servers, ensure the operating system is up to date and regularly update the container runtime environment.

OCI Container Instances eliminates all the complexity of the traditional approach and allows you to run containers and applications in them without having to manage any infrastructure or servers. A container image is all that's needed to run the application. The Oracle cloud manages the containerization server environment and computing resources. Containers run on fully managed computing resources optimized for workloads and provide reliable isolation for enhanced security.

With Container Instances, the customer pays the same price for using CPU and memory resources as with regular virtual machine instances. This type of container instance launch requires no extra payment. With OCI's excellent price-to-performance ratio of virtual machines and per-second billing, container instances provide the best price-to-performance ratio for running containers in the cloud.

This type of virtual machines for containers ensures a fast launch, allowing containers to be deployed in seconds. It is possible to create a new instance with one or more containers by specifying container images and a few simple parameters via CLI, API or Oracle Cloud Console. When creating an example, you can set virtual machine parameters for allocated basic computing resources, CPU and memory resources, as well as the VCN subnet where the instance is located.

This service allows you to run very resource-intensive applications. You can allocate all CPU resources and memory for an instance. For example, it is possible to allocate up to 64 cores (128 virtual CPUs) and 1024 GB of memory for one instance of an AMD E3 and E4 Flex-based virtual machine.

An extra advantage of the new service is the isolation of virtual machines to improve security. The container instance is isolated at the hypervisor level and does not share the OS kernel, CPU or memory resources with other cases, ensuring high performance and reducing the attack surface.

Virtual machines for containers (Container Instances) are great for running single containers or groups of containers that do not require a container orchestration platform like Kubernetes. Examples include applications for DevOps practices (CI/CD), cloud automation tasks, AI operations, etc. Interacting with these containers is as simple as an API call or CLI command, so you can easily run container tasks as part of your DevOps workflows, operations or data management.

Instances are also suitable for running isolated web applications or RESTful APIs. They allow you to use any platform of your choice to develop applications, package them as container images, and run them in container instances. Applications can consist of one or a group of containers. Containers running in the same instance are placed together and communicate through the local host or through a loopback interface, allowing you to use patterns such as full-stack application deployment and additional components.

OCI Container Instances can also assist with the migration of legacy monolithic applications to the cloud. These applications were generally not built to run on cloud-native platforms such as Kubernetes. For example, they may not scale horizontally or allow the loss of replicas. It is possible to put these standalone applications in containers and run them in container instances without incurring the additional operational costs associated with allocating resources, deploying patches and troubleshooting servers or virtual machines. It is also possible to allocate the CPU and memory resources needed to meet the needs of even the most demanding applications.

In addition, container instances can be used to quickly create and delete development and testing environments. Instead of using local workstations or managing virtual machines, developers can easily rely on container instances to improve performance and avoid workstation resource limitations, as well as the risk of running unknown workloads. It also allows developers to quickly set up test server parts that their application must access during development or testing.

For more information about OCI Container Instances, as well as other Oracle solutions, please e-mail oracle@muk.group