While upgrading one of our customers from 12.1.3 to 12.2.10 I realized (by chance) that Oracle made available the latest E4.Flex (AMD EPYC) shapes in the Frankfurt OCI data center last week. This was not the case at the time of the official “news update”.
Back in march the new instance type was only available in a single data center in Europe (Zurich).
This has now obviously changed: The new instance type can at least be used in the AD-1 and AD-3 availability domain of the EU-FRANKFURT1 data center. This is now also confirmed in the “Service Limits” documentation.
Both my first personal tests and the benchmarks with the new shape suggest that there is another 15-20 % speedup when compared to the E3.Flex instance. This is really great, given that even the older E3.Flex instance provides greater performance at maximum flexibility when compared both with the traditional Intel XEON CPU VMStandard2.x under OCI or with other Cloud vendors.