Over the years, we have used a few different cloud providers to host DreamFactory Developer Sandboxes. Every single cloud provider uses different terms and concepts for basically the same thing - compute, storage, transfer, gateways, and DNS routing, just to name a few. Having recently made the switch to the Oracle Bare Metal platform for our API Automation Portal, our team was immediately impressed by cost, performance, and ease of use.
NOTE: We've moved again! In June, 2019 we launched DreamFactory's hosted solution, known as Genie, on Amazon AWS. We are however maintaining this blog post for legacy purposes.
Don’t let the name fool you - with Bare Metal you can provision less than the entire server (36 cores) and still pick up all the performance you need. If you require the most performance “Bare Metal", you can reserve the entire server. For our purposes, the 8 core Standard (VM.Standard1.8) offers 8 OCPUs with hyperthreading and 56GB of RAM. This fit the bill for our multi-tenant application layer and we chose a dense IO instance to serve up our primary database (VM.DenseIO1.4). The database needs plenty of beefy IOPS, and right out of the box, Oracle Bare metal gives you a 3.2 TB NVMe SSD attached to the Dense IO instance. The read/write performance of the onboard SSD is without parallel in our experience.
Comparing costs to other cloud providers can be difficult, since many of the performance gains we picked up with Oracle simply weren’t available with other providers at the level we needed. For instance, with AWS you can get NVMe attached storage as well, but if you need as much space as 3.2 TB, you have to rapidly move up the scale to well over a $1.24/hr. Oracle Bare Metal charges you only per OCPU, so the 4 core dense IO instance was only $.60/hr ($.15 x 4 cores) with 3.2 TB storage attached! We estimate about a 40% savings in our IaaS bill, with a huge boost in performance.
As an enterprise ISV, another important differentiator that weighed heavily in our decision is that Oracle Cloud is an ecosystem opportunity with a mission critical anchor tenant (...Oracle’s installed base of apps and databases.)
This enables Oracle to provide a non-disruptive path to the cloud for organizations with a commitment to Oracle in their IT infrastructure. As the first force.com partner, DreamFactory has firsthand experience with the tremendous leverage that a robust ecosystem, mission critical anchor tenant, and motivated installed base can provide for software and integration partners.
In this new API Economy, Oracle is offering its partners something of extreme value - playing a major role in their customer’s digital transformation journey for both front and back office systems. DreamFactory’s value to the Oracle Cloud ecosystem is to automate a key aspect of this transformation with auto-generated API gateways to enterprise data.
In summary, DreamFactory sees three advantages to Oracle cloud over other hyperscalers - performance, economics, and a software development ecosystem built on top of a mission-critical anchor tenant.