There is a new feature available in Oracle Cloud infrastructure since the 13th of January 2020, now you can change the shape of a Compute instance. It replaces all the manual steps like stopping the existing instance, create a new one, attach the block device etc. – this is a short summary how it works.
From the OCI Release Notes :
You can change the shape of a virtual machine (VM) instance without having to rebuild your instances or redeploy your applications. This lets you scale up your Compute resources for increased performance, or scale down to reduce cost.
My existing Compute Instance
The existing machine has the shape VM-Standard2.1 – one OCPU and 15GB of memory.
[opc@webserverpublic01 ~]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor processor : 0 processor : 1
Change the Shape
Actions – Change Shape
Select the new shape – for the test case I selected VM-Standard2.2 – press Change Shape.
On Compute instance level, you can verify the work request UpdateInstance.
In the details of the work request, the progress is visible.
After tree minutes, the machine runs with the new shape and is ready to use.
[opc@webserverpublic01 ~]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor processor : 0 processor : 1 processor : 2 processor : 3
Summary
Changing and existing Compute shape is a feature what I have waited for since the beginning of OCI, after a few minutes the instance is back again with the new shape. I hope Oracle will now implement it for DBaaS too in the next weeks.