Explanation
A fault domain is a grouping of hardware and infrastructure within an availability domain. Each availability domain contains three fault domains. Fault domains provide anti-affinity: they let you distribute your instances so that the instances are not on the same physical hardware within a single availability domain. A hardware failure or Compute hardware maintenance event that affects one fault domain does not affect instances in other fault domains. In addition, the physical hardware in a fault domain has independent and redundant power supplies, which prevents a failure in the power supply hardware within one fault domain from affecting other fault domains.
To control the placement of your compute instances, bare metal DB system instances, or virtual machine DB system instances, you can optionally specify the fault domain for a new instance or instance pool at launch time. If you don't specify the fault domain, the system selects one for you. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure makes a best-effort anti-affinity placement across different fault domains, while optimizing for available capacity in the availability domain. To change the fault domain for an instance, terminate it and launch a new instance in the preferred fault domain.
Use fault domains to do the following things:
Protect against unexpected hardware failures or power supply failures.
Protect against planned outages because of Compute hardware maintenance.