Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Documentation

Getting Started with Oracle Linux

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has a set of Oracle Linux platform images that you can select when creating an instance.

For more information about Oracle Linux platform images, see Platform Images. For information about specific releases of platform images, see Release Information.

Key features of Oracle Linux on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

The Oracle Linux images available on OCI are described in Oracle Linux Images.

The advantages of OCI Oracle Linux images over traditional Oracle Linux deployments are:

  • Instances automatically have access to Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) content.

    • If the instance is connected to a service gateway, it has access to ULN content through the regional yum servers. Unlike the publicly available Oracle Linux yum server, the OCI regional yum servers mirror all ULN channels. This lets you access ULN content without registering the system with ULN or using other tools to manage channel access, simplifying software management on the instance.

  • All images have Oracle Ksplice installed by default.

    • You can run Ksplice to install patches manually or enable automatic updates to get the latest security patches without any need to reboot.

  • The default kernel is the latest version Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) available for the image.

    • Setting the default kernel to UEK ensures the broadest functionality support immediately after deploying an instance.

  • Instances can use the OCI Utilities.

    • The OCI utilities are a set of custom tools that let the instance access information about infrastructure resources. These tools can help automatically discover or provision resources as you need them.