Frequently Asked Questions for Oracle Cloud Stack

Topics:

What is Oracle Cloud Stack?

Oracle Cloud Stack is a feature of Oracle Cloud that empowers users to automate the provisioning and management of multiple cloud services as a single unit called a stack.

See About Oracle Cloud Stack.

What Oracle Cloud services can I create with Oracle Cloud Stack?

Oracle Cloud Stack supports the creation of specific types of cloud resources, and Oracle is continually adding to this list.

See About Oracle Stack Templates and List of Resource Types.

What does Oracle Cloud Stack cost?

You do not have to explicitly obtain a subscription for Oracle Cloud Stack — it is free to use for all Oracle Cloud customers. However, in order to create a cloud stack you must have a valid subscription to all of the Oracle Cloud services of which the stack is comprised. For example, in order to use a stack template that includes an Oracle Java Cloud Service instance, your Oracle Cloud account must have a subscription to Oracle Java Cloud Service and it also must have the appropriate entitlements to use the desired features of Oracle Java Cloud Service.

How do I access Oracle Cloud Stack?

The features of Oracle Cloud Stack are accessible from a web console, a command-line interface (CLI) or a REST API.

See Accessing Oracle Cloud Stack.

What is a stack template?

Cloud stacks are created from templates. A template is a text file that defines what cloud resources to create, how to create them and any dependencies between them. Templates can also define input parameters that enable cloud users to further customize each stack. Oracle Cloud Stack provides you with standard templates for common scenarios, but you can also create your own templates.

See About Oracle Stack Templates and About Template Components.

How do I create a custom stack template?

You can create a new template from scratch, or you can copy one of the standard Oracle templates and use it as a starting point.

The Oracle Cloud Stack console provides a graphical Template Builder tool to simplify the creation and maintenance of templates. By using the Template Builder and learning a few simple template functions, you can implement most cloud stack requirements. More experienced authors can use additional template features and functions in order to implement more advanced requirements like conditional logic.

If you prefer to use your own favorite editor for template development, you can also import and export template files to and from Oracle Cloud Stack.

See Creating a Template and Editing Template Files.

Who uses Oracle Cloud Stack?

Oracle Cloud Stack gives IT Operations more control over how your development and testing environments are created and managed in Oracle Cloud, and also ensures that these tasks are easily repeatable. Your Operations team can create custom stack templates that meet their precise setup requirements. Working with templates requires some familiarity with YAML documents and the underlying REST APIs used to create cloud services.

Developer Operations (or DevOps) advocates automating the tasks of provisioning and managing environments for developers, testers and end users. Similarly, DevOps treats all of the resources used to provision these environments just like other code artifacts. Oracle Cloud Stack aligns with these IT objectives by providing users with stack templates, a command-line interface and a REST API.