Five questions to ask when deciding on a deployment option for Oracle Databases in the Oracle Cloud Government Regions

Deciding on a deployment option or target for your Oracle Databases in the Oracle Cloud Government Regions, is one of the first steps in your migration to cloud. You may be looking to the cloud for a database sandbox to test new versions, features, or performance, where do you start and how do you decide? The first thing you may think of is performance characteristics. If you are a partner and you ask a customer for performance requirements or characteristics. What kind of answers do you typically receive? The answers will most likely be inconclusive or vague. As an end user, you will simply know that it either runs well or it runs poorly in your current environment. As a Solutions Architect or a Partner, you will be asked to make a recommendation on behalf of a customer. Where do you even start? You can go down the path of gathering workload characteristics to see what fits by using Oracle’s Automatic Workload Repository. What if you do not have historical data, are in a discovery phase, or want to run a proof of concept, what is the first step? To help, I’ve come up with five easy questions to make the first step in deciding on a deployment options for Oracle Database in our government regions. These questions will steer you or your customer in the right direction to make an optimal decision. 

The Oracle Database Cloud Service Options in the Oracle Cloud Government Regions

There are several options, but each option has its benefits. Keep in mind there are many more factors into choosing the right Oracle database deployment option.  Other factors such as type of workloads, edition features, performance specifications, and availability should be considered. For our partners contact your sales representative and ask them about our Cloud Services Navigator tool. The Cloud Services Navigator tool allows Oracle to help you dive deeper into your requirements to help narrow down the choices. The method described in this blog post simplifies the choices for you to get started or for those that are starting a project from a fresh start. This also creates a more educated recommendation. Note, at the time of publishing this post, our Autonomous options are not available in our government cloud regions yet. Check with your sales representative for availability before choosing the Autonomous path in the government regions.

The five questions you should ask when deciding on an Oracle Database deployment option:

1. Administration: Is there a requirement for OS/SYSDBA access? – This will depend on a managed or unmanaged database service option. In an unmanaged database service option, you will be granted access to the OS and/or have SYSDBA access. In a managed database service option, you will be granted OS and/or SYSDBA access. 
2. High Availability: Is there a requirement for Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) for high availability? – Oracle RAC is available for Database Cloud Service (DBCS) VM, Exadata Cloud Service, and Autonomous, if RAC is a must have option, then your options are easily narrowed down for you. 
3. Backups: Do you want your backups to be manual or automatic? – Backups are automatic when you choose a managed service option for your Oracle Database in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
4. Management: Do you want to manage your databases and the infrastructure? – I consider this a critical decision; how much do you want to manage vs how much do you want Oracle to manager. Depending on which option you choose, this will dictate how operations and maintenance such as patching the OS or upgrading the database are performed.  Our Autonomous Database options will require no interaction for patching and upgrading, while the other options the customer is responsible for either OS patching, database patching, or both.
5. Capacity and Scaling: How much storage and CPU is required? – Each of these options have its limitations in terms of storage and CPU.

Here is a decision tree to better visualize how the questions will walk you through the options and the paths:

In addition to the decision tree, this is a table describing the various versions, options, and hardware needs of which the decision tree was created.

 There is no right or wrong answer when deciding on an Oracle Database Cloud Service deployment option:

As you can see, deciding on a database deployment option is a critical path in your steps to migrating to the cloud.  There is no right or wrong answer, but it helps you with optimizing the choices. For example, you may be currently running Exadata today, however, running Database Cloud Services in a bare metal or virtual machine option, may be enough. By answering these five easy questions, it helps you narrow down your choices and, in some cases, helps with optimizing the choice. The choice optimization may lead to costs savings down the road. One of the beauties of using the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Government Regions as with any cloud provider, is the ability to quickly create and tear down resources.  If you find that what you chose initially is not a right fit, bring up a new resource, migrate, and tear down the old one. 

Every use case is different. The only way to know if Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is right for you is to try it. You can select either the Oracle Cloud Free Tier or a 30-day free trial in our commercial regions, in  which includes US$300 in credit to get you started with a range of services, including compute, storage, and networking.  For our government regions, the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Government Regions consists of FedRAMP High Federal/Civilian authorized regions and IL5 Department of Defense (DoD) authorized regions, be sure to consult with your Oracle sales representative for a proof of concept in the appropriate region.