Introduction to Oracle Private Cloud Appliance

Oracle Private Cloud Appliance is engineered to deliver a comprehensive suite of cloud infrastructure services within the secure environment of your on-premises network. The system integrates all required hardware and software components, and has been tested, configured and tuned for optimal performance by Oracle engineers. In essence, it is a flexible general purpose IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) solution in the sense that it supports the widest variety of workloads. Its pluggable platform provides an excellent foundation to layer PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions on top of the infrastructure.

This release of Private Cloud Appliance provides API compatibility with Oracle's public cloud solution, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. You access the core IaaS services using the same methods, tools and interfaces as with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. An installation of Private Cloud Appliance represents a customer region. Workloads are portable between your private and public cloud environments, but the private cloud is disconnected from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and thus runs its own control plane components in order to host its set of compatible services.

As an engineered system, Private Cloud Appliance complies with the highest business continuity and serviceability requirements. It has the capabilities to monitor all components, detect potential problems, send out alerts, and automatically log a service request. Subsequent troubleshooting and repair can be performed without affecting the uptime of the environment.

System upgrades are also designed for minimum disruption and maximum availability. Health checks are performed before an upgrade to ensure that all components are in an acceptable state. The upgrade process is modular and allows components – such as firmware, operating systems, containerized services or the system's main database – to be upgraded individually or as an integrated multi-component workflow.