Oracle announced today it will make available for the first time ARM-based processors on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) that will also be supported as targets for deploying applications using GitHub, GitLab or Jenkins platforms. The latest Oracle service is based on processors from Ampere Computing.

The company also revealed today it has joined the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), an arm of the Linux Foundation that oversees the development of open source DevOps platforms and tools such as Jenkins and Spinnaker.

Matt Leonard, vice president of compute for OCI, said the OCI Ampere A1 Compute provides an alternative to existing support for the x86-based processors that Oracle provides. That service will be offered at a cost of one cent per core hour with virtual machine sizes ranging from one to 80 OCPUs configured with one to 64 GB of memory per core or as a bare-metal service with 160 core and 1 TB of memory. Pricing per GB of RAM per hour is $0.0015. At that price point, Leonard said Oracle is now offering the lowest price per core of any cloud service provider.

The growing availability of ARM-based processors is starting to have an impact on cloud economics at a time when organizations are significantly increasing the number of applications being built and deployed on public clouds. Many of those organizations, to reduce overall costs, are now actively evaluating ARM-based services, noted Leonard.

To help jumpstart application development on the platform, Oracle is providing organizations with three classes of OCI Ampere A1 Compute services. An Oracle Cloud Free Tier gives developers $300 in free credits for 30 days. The Always Free ARM option gives developers four A1 cores and 24 GB memory, while an ARM Accelerator option provides open source developers, independent software vendors (ISV) partners, customers and universities with ARM-based development projects that need additional resources beyond what the Oracle Cloud Free Tier provides with credits for a 12-month period.

Oracle Linux, Java, MySQL, GraalVM and the Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) service are also all available on the OCI Ampere A1 Compute along with integrations with DevOps platforms from GitHub, GitLab and/or Jenkins. Other vendors providing support for OCI Ampere A1 Compute include SUSE, Datadog, OnSpecta, NGINX and Genymobile.

Oracle has also made available an Oracle Linux Cloud Developer image that enables DevOps teams to install, configure and launch a development environment via an OCI console that includes OCI client tools, utilities and common programming languages such as Java, GraalVM, Python, PHP, Node.js, Go and C/C++.

Finally, each Ampere core is single threaded by design with its own 64 KB L1 I-cache, 64 KB L1 D-cache and a huge one MB L2 D-cache to eliminate any ‘noisy neighbor’ issues that IT organizations might otherwise encounter.

Oracle is clearly betting that ARM-based processors will present the company with an opportunity to gain share at the expense of larger infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) rivals such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. It’s not clear to what degree IT teams might employ a different cloud service just to access ARM-based processors. However, in a world where IT teams now routinely employ multiple clouds, as far as Oracle is concerned, the playing field has never been more level.