Oracle Corporation
08/05/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 08/05/2024 09:07
Introducing OCI Ampere A2: Oracle’s next generation Arm based cloud ...
Introducing OCI Ampere A2: Oracle's next-generation Arm-based cloud compute
August 5, 2024 | 5 minute read
Amit Rajkhowa
Senior Principal Product Manager
Calvin Smith
Product Marketing Director
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is pleased to announce the launch of its second-generation Ampere Arm-based compute instances, OCI Ampere A2. Building on the success of the pioneering OCI Ampere A1 instances, the A2 series delivers even higher performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency for a wide range of cloud workloads.
Since the general availability of OCI Ampere A1 in 2021, Oracle has garnered positive traction and proven deployments from customers across multiple industries, including unified communications, cloud monitoring, development tools, insurance services, and automotive simulation. Over 100 OCI services, including critical first-party services like Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Apps, now run seamlessly on Ampere-based OCI A1 instances and Oracle Linux. Since its launch, OCI Ampere has offered excellent price for performance for Arm-based compute in the cloud, and OCI Ampere A2 now makes the economics and performance even more compelling.
OCI Ampere A2: Better than ever
OCI Ampere A2 instances represent the next generation of Arm-based processing, providing higher core count virtual machines (VMs) and high-density containers within a single server. These instances take advantage of the lowest latency interconnection, making them ideal for services like Kubernetes and media services, and offer excellent price-for-performance.
A2 instances offer the following key features, pricing, and performance characteristics:
Based on the AmpereOne processor family, delivering up to 78 OCPUs (1 OCPU = 2 AmpereOne cores, 156 cores total)
Up to 946 GB of DDR5 memory with 25% more bandwidth compared to A1
L2 cache of 2 MB per core, 100% increase over the previous generation
Flexible VM sizes, with up to 946 GB of memory and block storage boot volumes up to 32 TB
Networking bandwidth of up to 78 Gbps ethernet and up to 24 virtual network interface cards (VNICs)
28% more performant on average than A1 for a range of cloud native workloads like Cassandra (13% better), NGINIX (18% better), Postgres (27% better), and MySQL Point Select (59% better)
Industry-leading Arm-based cloud compute pricing, at $0.014/OCPU/hour and $0.002/GB/hour
Shape
OCPU
Memory
Storage
Network
VM.Standard.A2.Flex
1-78 OCPUs
(OCPU is two cores of AmpereOne processor)
1-946 GB
Block storage only
Up to 78 Gbps
Industry-standard application and micro benchmarks show increased performance of OCI Ampere A2 over A1. The 2-MB L2 cache and performance characteristics of A2 overall show that database workloads, such as Cassandra, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, can benefit an average of 28% across workloads, as compared to A1 instances. Similarly, customers running web servers can see a performance increase of up to 18%, as the NGINX benchmark shows. Tests were run on 16-core, 96-GB VMs on both shapes, run multiple times, and averaged to produce the following numbers. All SPEC numbers are estimates.
Comparison results of normalized A2 and A1 virtual machines across SPECrate, Cassandra, PostgreSQL, MySQL Writes, MySQL Point Select, and NGINX.
Key workloads
Optimal price-for-performance for containerized applications
Ampere's performance characteristics in containers make OCI Ampere A2 the ideal price-for-performance solution for running containerized workloads on your Kubernetes cluster. You can use OCI Ampere A2 shapes to run containers with Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE), benefiting from optimal price-for-performance at scale.
Red Bull Racing uses OCI Ampere A1 instances on OKE, which has helped them to increase the number of track-side Monte Carlo simulations they can run by 25%, improving model accuracy and enabling sharper decision making. Red Bull Racing attributes these performance gains as part of the reason for their tremendous success over the past few seasons.
"Leveraging the power and flexibility of Kubernetes on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure A1 compute, we've been able to realize massive simulation model accuracy and performance improvements, which have contributed to the success that we have seen as a team and business since 2021," said Matt Cadieux, chief information officer at Red Bull Racing. "Moving forward, we're excited about moving to OCI A2 to realize even more substantial performance gains as our partnership continues."
Optimal price-for-performance for media services and video streaming
OCI Ampere A2 is highly performant for running video service and web conferencing workloads, providing linear scalability, low latency, and predictable performance while protecting against noisy neighbor processor effects.
A leader in cloud communications services, 8x8 adopted Ampere A1 instances and was able to roll out their enterprise-grade services within three weeks, achieving high performance and low latency.
"OCI Ampere processors have been performing really well for us," said Mehdi Salour, SVP of Global Network and DevOps at 8x8. "They give us consistent linear performance, which is very important for applications, such as real-time voice and video. Cost-performance has also been excellent. We're saving money, and we're doing something good for the environment, so we are hitting all three goals."
The performance characteristics and cost savings of OCI Ampere A2 also makes these shapes ideal for multiple additional workloads, including the following examples:
Analytics and databases: Low power and high core density per rack make OCI Ampere A2 well-suited for handling the massive computational power and persistent high-performance storage and network requirements of big data analytics workloads.
Cloud native web services: Ampere's cloud native processors in OCI A2 shapes offer flexibility, scalability, and resilience for modern web services, delivering lower response times, higher throughput, and scalable, predictable performance compared to x86 architecture-based processors.
Getting started
With the launch of OCI Ampere A2, Oracle continues to push the boundaries of cloud computing performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Whether you're running containerized applications, media and video streaming workloads, or demanding cloud native services, OCI Ampere A2 instances offer a compelling value proposition. Join the growing number of customers who are leveraging the power of Arm-based computing on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and experience the benefits of Oracle and Ampere's innovative architecture for your workloads. Get started today.