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Oracle used its CloudWorld conference in New York Jan. 17 to announce new enhancements to the Oracle Cloud Platform and the expansion of its cloud services to three new regions over the next six months.

The regional expansion of Oracle’s cloud footprint will include Reston, Va., London and Turkey, the company said. The new regions are “expected to come online by mid-2017,” it said in a news release.

With the expansion, Oracle will have “doubled the regional presence of its cloud platform in the last 24 months,” with 29 regions available globally, it said. Additional regions are planned to come online in the Asia Pacific region, North America, and the Middle East through mid-2018, it said.

Each of Oracle’s planned new cloud regions will consist of at least three high-bandwidth, low-latency sites — or availability domains (ADs), Oracle said. The ADs are to be located several miles from each other, it said.

Enhancements made to the cloud platform, meanwhile, will make it “even more compelling for customers to move business-critical applications to the cloud,” Oracle said. New Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services, for example, “expand support for web-scale and enterprise applications,” it said.

Oracle IaaS now offers one, two, and four-core virtual machine (VM) shapes, which run on the same low latency, high performance Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) as its bare metal compute shapes, block volumes, and object storage, it said, calling that “an industry first.” In addition, a new Load Balancing Service adds three provisioned bandwidth shapes — 100Mbps, 400Mbps, and 8Gbps — supporting a range of application traffic, high availability, and security needs, it said. Other enhancements include a new block storage shape (2TB) and encryption-at-rest for object storage.

“These latest investments in the Oracle Cloud Platform provide a clear path to develop, test, and scale applications — with the Oracle Database or third-party databases,” Thomas Kurian, Oracle president of product development, said in a news release.

With the enhancements, Oracle Cloud Platform “now delivers differentiated database performance at every scale, and deeply integrated IaaS capabilities, for customers of any size to easily develop, test, and deploy their business-critical applications in the cloud,” the company said.

The company also said attendee registration and a call for papers opened for Oracle Code, a new free event series that it said will “bring developers together to learn about the latest technologies, best practices and industry trends.” Starting March 1 in San Francisco, the Oracle Code event series “will give attendees the insights they need to tackle development challenges in the Cloud through a combination of keynotes, technical sessions and hands-on labs delivered by industry luminaries, community members and Oracle experts,” it said. In total, there will be events in 20 cities across North America, Europe, Asia and South America in 2017, it said.