Oracle Cloud SDK Patterns

Overview

Production patterns for the OCI Python SDK that avoid the most common pitfalls: memory leaks from Instance Principal authentication (~10 MiB/hour if clients are recreated per request), missing retry logic for 429/500 errors, and timeout misconfiguration across different service clients. The OCI SDK has different timeout defaults depending on the service (Compute: 60s, Object Storage: 300s for uploads), and none of them set connection timeouts by default.

Purpose: Provide correct client lifecycle (create once, reuse, close), exponential backoff retry, singleton patterns that prevent the Instance Principal memory leak, and per-service timeout configuration.

Prerequisites

• Completed oraclecloud-install-auth — valid ~/.oci/config
• Python 3.8+ with pip install oci
• Familiarity with OCI service clients (ComputeClient, ObjectStorageClient, etc.)

Instructions

Step 1: Singleton Client Pattern (Avoids Memory Leak)

Instance Principal authentication allocates new security tokens on each client instantiation. Creating clients per-request leaks ~10 MiB/hour. Use a singleton: