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The company’s automated load balancing reduces the need for manual input.

Oracle this week unveiled a new feature in the company’s cloud platform: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Flexible Load Balancer. The new service aims to facilitate easier addition and removal of network resources inside enterprise application environments.

Load balancers help divide incoming packets between servers to evenly distribute workloads. A cloud deployment’s load balancer is also responsible for ensuring that there’s enough network bandwidth provisioned to support the inbound traffic. Load balancing is now an integral component of those enterprise technology systems that are responsible for managing network traffic.

Technology has greatly streamlined and enhanced many aspects of enterprise technology management. However, managing network capacity is an area that still requires manual intervention by IT teams. Oracle’s Flexible Load Balancer reduces the need for such manual input through automation.

Related: Oracle expands next generation cloud in Europe

Delivering flexibility to application infrastructure

Gopi Gopalakrishnan, Oracle’s Principal Product Manager, introduced the load balancer in a blog post. “As the gateway between users and your application, your load balancers are a mission-critical piece of that application infrastructure,” he wrotes. “And Oracle’s load balancers now provide that flexibility.”

With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Flexible Load Balancing, customers are free from fixed bandwidth load balancer shapes or scaling based only on general traffic patterns, he explains. Users can choose a custom minimum bandwidth and an optional maximum bandwidth. Both these settings can be anywhere between 10 Mbps and 8,000 Mbps.

The minimum bandwidth is always available and provides instant readiness for customer workloads, according to Gopalakrishnan. The optional maximum bandwidth setting can limit bandwidth, even during unexpected peaks, if a customer needs to control costs. Based on incoming traffic patterns, available bandwidth will scale up from the minimum as traffic increases.

Flexible Low Cost and Enhanced Free-Tier Experience 

Oracle bills the flexible load balancer solution at a simple flat rate (USD 0.0113 per hour) for active load balancer instances and a bandwidth usage charge (USD 0.0001 per Mbps per Hour). Bandwidth usage, they charge per minute at the customer’s minimum bandwidth configuration irrespective of usage.

Oracle’s always-free tier customer accounts get one flexible load balancer with a minimum and maximum bandwidth of 10 Mbps. Paid customer accounts (excluding Government customers) get their first load balancer instance at no charge along with the first 10 Mbps of bandwidth usage.