Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Arm-Based Compute

Ampere A1 Compute is a general-purpose, Arm-based compute platform based on the Ampere Altra processor. Ampere A1 Compute instances provide superior price-performance, near linear scaling, built-in security due to the single-threaded core architecture, and a broad developer ecosystem.

Arm processors, ubiquitous in mobile computing, are increasingly used in PCs, laptops, and servers. Arm processors use a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architecture, which requires less power and less silicon for each core than x86 processors. Arm puts more cores in a CPU socket and provides more dedicated resources for each core. As a result, Arm processors provide predictable performance, provide the highest density of cores, and consume overall less power. Ampere A1 Compute eases server-side development on Arm by providing the performance, features, and scalability required for cloud-to-edge infrastructure on Arm.

Ampere A1 Compute instances are suitable for a wide range of applications and use cases. For example:

  • Containerized workloads
  • Databases and in-memory databases, including MySQL
  • Web applications
  • Media encoding
  • AI and machine learning (ML) inferencing
  • Mobile apps and game development
  • High performance computing (HPC)

Oracle's development stack is available on Ampere A1 Compute, including Oracle Linux, Java, MySQL, GraalVM, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Container Engine for Kubernetes. To make it easier to start developing on Ampere A1 Compute, you can use the pre-built Oracle Linux Cloud Developer platform image. For a full list of open-source organizations and partners that have developed solutions for Ampere A1 Compute, see the Ampere A1 Compute product page.

Creating Arm-Based Compute Instances

You can create Arm-based virtual machine (VM) and bare metal compute instances using Ampere A1 Compute.

Tip

If this is your first time creating an instance, for a complete guided workflow see: Tutorial: Launching Your First Linux Instance.

If you're already familiar with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and want to explore the full set of configuration options that are available when you create an instance, follow the detailed steps to create an instance.

Flexible hardware specifications: The Ampere A1 Compute shapes  include the BM.Standard.A1.160 shape for bare metal instances and the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape for VMs. For information about the OCPU count, memory, storage, and networking details of these shapes, see Compute Shapes.

Because the Ampere A1 Compute shape for VMs is a flexible shape, you can customize the number of OCPUs and amount of memory that are allocated to each instance. This flexibility lets you build VMs that match your workload, enabling you to optimize performance and minimize cost.

Images: We recommend the Oracle Linux Cloud Developer image, available as a platform image. Oracle Linux Cloud Developer provides the latest development tools, languages and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure software development kits (SDKs) to rapidly launch a comprehensive development environment. The Oracle Linux and Ubuntu platform images are also supported.

Managing instances: After you create an Ampere A1 Compute instance, you can use many of the features that are available for compute instances. For example:

Getting Started with Ampere A1 Compute for Free

All tenancies, including paid, trial, and Always Free accounts, get the first 3,000 OCPU hours and 18,000 GB hours per month for free for Ampere A1 Compute instances. For Always Free tenancies, this is equivalent to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of memory.

If your project requires more resources, apply to participate in the Arm Accelerator program.

Tutorials and Reference Architectures

To get started with Ampere A1 Compute, follow the step-by-step instructions in these tutorials:

For more resources, see the Arm developer page.

Deploying Containerized Applications on Ampere A1 Compute

Ampere A1 Compute is a native cloud platform designed for running containers to build native cloud workloads.

Use Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) to define and create Kubernetes clusters to enable the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. For more information, see Running Applications on Arm-based Nodes.

Use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Registry to store, share, and manage development artifacts like Docker images in an Oracle-managed registry.