The benefits of using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) are widely known: Organizations get the same familiar control, security, and high performance of on-prem infrastructure with the additional advantage of cost savings.  What many organizations don’t know is that by using a smart and astute approach, they can squeeze out even more cost savings with relative ease.

Infrastructure teams – accustomed to the legacy model of handling compute, storage, network and database separately – are being drawn toward OCI’s cloud-based Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model because they pay only for what is used. This also provides us the key to substantially reduce cost of using OCI.

An organization representing Brazil’s industries has already implemented a cost-containment solution created by Wipro. The solution is helping save thousands of dollars each year without compromising availability, features or scale.

The solution evolved during the implementation of the Public Sector Revenue Management (PSRM) application for the client. During the implementation, the client mentioned that it was being burdened by the overheads required to Start and Stop the Database Cloud Services (DBCS) nodes, Java Cloud Service (JCS) nodes and the SOA Cloud Service (SOACS) to ensure OCI ran only during business hours.

Human intervention was required to log in to the OCI console, navigate separately to each of the service dashboards for DBCS, JCS and SOACS and Start instances in each of the service types one at a time and, later, to navigate to each service dashboard and Stop instances one at a time. This meant going from console to console to perform the Start/Stop operations.

We created automation (using Python, OCI – CLI utility, OCI – psm utility, REST API and cURL to achieve the desired results) to manage the Start/Stop processes. At a predetermined/ scheduled time, a script starts and stops processes, sending an email notification to the user, eliminating the need to execute the process manually.

The automation enabled a 60.58% cost saving. For larger organizations, the percentage savings would be approximately similar; but in absolute terms, the number can be large. With small changes in the automation script, the system can be shut down during holidays (other than weekends), enabling even higher savings.

Apart from the Start/Stop function, the automation can be scaled to perform additional OCI operations like adding nodes, adding storage, creating VM, etc. The solution can also be used across industries by any organization or account using OCI.

Ashish Tiwari

Oracle Apps DBA and Cloud Architect, Oracle Practice, Wipro Limited

Ashish brings 12+ years of experience in the Apps DBA field and various automation in DBA and other areas, helping clients drive business better and making it robust. He has been part of Wipro's HOLMES^TM and Digital journey and has been actively implementing automation solutions at various client locations.