The primary purpose of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Functions is to provide a serverless compute service that enables you to build, deploy, and run applications without managing servers. It’s a fully managed, multi-tenant, highly scalable, on-demand, Functions-as-a-Service platform, powered by the open-source Fn Project. With OCI Functions, you can write code that gets executed in response to various events, such as HTTP requests, database changes, and more.

Key features and purposes of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Functions include:

1. Event-Driven Execution: Trigger functions in response to events like HTTP requests, changes in data, cloud events, etc.

2. Automatic Scaling: Functions scale automatically by running code in response to each trigger. Your functions can quickly scale up to handle peak loads and then scale down when traffic decreases.

3. Stateless Design: Functions are designed to be stateless, making them easy to reason about and test, as well as highly parallelizable.

4. Cost-Efficiency: You only pay for the compute time you consume; there is no charge when your code is not running.

5. Language Support: You can write functions in a variety of programming languages like Java, Python, Node.js, Go, etc.

6. Integrated Developer Experience: Easy to deploy and manage using familiar tools, including CLI, console, and SDKs.

7. Strong Security: Functions run within your VCN (Virtual Cloud Network) for network isolation. Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies can be used to control permissions.

8. Observability: OCI provides monitoring, logging, and debugging capabilities to help you troubleshoot and optimize your functions.

9. Resource Management: OCI takes care of the operational burden, allowing you to focus on writing code and business logic.

By abstracting away much of the underlying infrastructure, OCI Functions simplifies the development process, allowing developers to focus on writing code, thereby accelerating time to market for new applications and services.