The capability gap between hyperscale cloud providers has begun to narrow; however, fierce competition for enterprise workloads extends to secondary markets worldwide.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) essentially created the cloud IaaS market in 2006 and still offers the richest suite of public cloud IaaS capabilities, along with deep and broad PaaS-layer capabilities.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was launched in November 2016. Oracle’s cloud offering has evolved ever since then. Gartner too has recognised Oracle major infrastructure improvements over the past year. It has also been recognised to manage High Performance compute workloads for Oracle and Non-Oracle workloads as well. However Oracle has still some catching up to do to gain a bigger pie of the market share.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is enterprise-grade and is based on Oracle’s decades of experience addressing the mission-critical needs for their customers. Oracle provides solutions expertise beyond just commodity infrastructure. OCI combines the elasticity and efficiencies of public cloud with the granular control, security, and predictability of on-premises infrastructure. Built to meet the needs of mission-critical applications, OCI supports traditional workloads while delivering modern cloud-native development platforms and tools.
Oracle Cloud vs AWS: Areas to Compare
Complete Cloud Stack from IaaS to SaaS
Unlike AWS, Oracle has a complete cloud stack including OCI, enterprise SaaS (e.g. ERP, HCM and CRM, etc.), industry-specific SaaS solutions, and on premises offerings such as Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer. Oracle has the strength of a complete cloud stack, with the ability to integrate and extend across all the layers of cloud. While AWS offers many infrastructure services, it is missing enterprise SaaS and industry-specific SaaS solutions to support customer’s broader C-level and LOB-level requirements. AWS also has limited ability to integrate and extend across all layers of cloud.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure edge over AWS:
- VMware solution with full administrative control.
- Bare metal servers suitable for any enterprise application – with up to 128 cores, 2 TB of RAM, and 1 PB of storage
- High performance bare metal servers with local storage optimized for use cases like HPC
- GPUs on bare metal servers
Consistent High Performance
Representing a fundamental re-architecture of the public cloud, OCI is a Gen 2 enterprise cloud that delivers high performance, low-latency networking and all-flash local and block storage (see here and Exabyte.io benchmarks). Non-variable high-performance stems from a fast and flat network design with no resource oversubscription – eliminating noisy neighbours. Oracle pioneered the use of off-box network virtualization to eliminate server performance degradation.
Consistent High Performance: Representing a fundamental re-architecture of the public cloud, OCI is a Gen 2 enterprise cloud that delivers high performance, low-latency networking and all-flash local and block storage (see here and Exabyte.io benchmarks). Non-variable high-performance stems from a fast and flat network design with no resource oversubscription – eliminating noisy neighbours. Oracle pioneered the use of off-box network virtualization to eliminate server performance degradation.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure edge over AWS:
- Isolated network virtualization not only improves network performance, it increases security by significantly reducing the attack surface that malicious hackers typically attempt to exploit.
- Latest chipsets from Intel, AMD and NVIDIA, all-flash NVMe SSD and block storage and low latency networking combine to offer optimized performance.
- For the most demanding workloads like High Performance Computing, Oracle offers RDMA cluster networking – a technology that reduces latency between hosts to microseconds.
- As per Oracle many customers such as 8×8, Cisco Tetration, OceanX, Zoom and others have selected OCI over AWS and other cloud providers for better performance and superior economics.
Superior Economics
OCI uses simple, transparent and consistent pricing across all regions. Oracle’s standard Intel-based VM pricing is offered at 2X better price/performance than AWS for general purpose & memory optimized instances. Bare metal instances are 4.8X better IOPS price/performance than AWS for high I/O intensive instances. OCI block storage is 20X higher IOPS/GB compared to AWS EBS General Purpose SSD. AWS not only has higher subscription cost, it also has high charges for data egress and enterprise support. There are many other cost surprises (see Dao Research: AWS Cost Surprises). Moreover, AWS charges various rates for the same product in different regions making the cost for a VM alternate by more than 35% between regions. Third parties have validated Oracle remains a pricing leader for compute while also offering enhanced compute power and memory per dollar than competitors (see Redmonk Review). Consistent global pricing, lack of hidden charges, flexible Universal Credits, BYOL capabilities and free enterprise support provide an optimal customer experience without cost surprises
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure edge over AWS:
- Industry-leading pricing for compute, storage, and networking. OCI standard, Intel-based VMs are up to 61% cheaper, OCI block storage is up to 99% cheaper,
- Low, consistent pricing globally.1
- Industry-leading low-cost data egress- OCI data egress is up to 95% cheaper1
- Cloud platform designed to deliver consistent and predictable performance, leveraging isolated network virtualization to avoid noisy neighbours.
- Customizable compute shapes and storage performance, the number of OCPUs and the amount of memory granularly in 1 OCPU or 1 GB increments when launching or resizing compute instances.
Comprehensive SLAs
Enterprises demand more than just availability from their cloud infrastructure, yet most cloud provider SLAs cover solely availability and offer no recourse for degraded performance or the inability to manage resources. Only Oracle offers end-to-end SLAs covering availability, performance and management with targets and penalties associated with diminished availability, performance and manageability of its cloud services (see Oracle SLAs). AWS offers only availability SLA, but not performance and manageability SLAs. Therefore, AWS is under no obligation to compensate the customers for degraded performance of its services or the inability to manage its resources.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure edge over AWS:
- Offers manageability SLAs to ensure your ability to manage, monitor, and modify resources.
- Performance SLAs, Oracle is the first cloud vendor to guarantee performance, so you can rely on our infrastructure for enterprise applications.
Secure by Design. Security is a core design principle within OCI. OCI provides protection for data and applications by combining layers of defence across the network, physical hardware and web-facing layers aligned to hardened operational procedures. Oracle provides end-to-end customer workload isolation. Always-on encryption protects customer data at-rest. Easy-to-use security, identity and management policies further constrain access to services and segregate operational responsibilities to reduce risk associated with malicious and accidental user actions (for more information, see Dao Research: Securing Data and Applications in the Cloud).
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure edge over AWS:
- OCI Security Zones provides secure enclaves within accounts for the most sensitive workloads, where security is mandatory and always on.
- Oracle Cloud Guard is a built-in security posture management capabilities which provides prescriptive and automated remediation of findings more cost effective than AWS solution.
- Security services are included without additional costs with Oracle Cloud Guard
- Easy management of access policies at enterprise scale, always enforcing least privilege and zero trust principles using compartments and SQL-like, easy-to-understand identity and access management policies.
Oracle Dedicated Region
Oracle Dedicated Region combines the benefits of cloud computing – including elasticity, scalability, ease of service delivery, and cloud subscription – with the security, control, and dedicated resources of on-premises infrastructure. In contrast, AWS Outposts supports only a small subset of cloud services compared to its AWS public cloud. It is also missing SLAs and does not support customer’s stringent requirements for compliance and data residency/sovereignty. For database workloads, many customers have selected Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer because of their requirements for security, compliance, performance, control, low latency, and data sovereignty. Oracle ExaC@C provides unique hardware and software co-engineering and optimization for extreme database performance that is not available from competition, as they run on generic hardware infrastructure that is not optimized for enterprise performance. Many AWS database services (e.g. Aurora, Redshift, and RDS for Oracle) are also not available on Outposts.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure edge over AWS:
- Oracle offers the exact same services in your data center as their public cloud with Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer to help address data sovereignty concerns.
- Billing model for on-premises deployment the same as the public cloud, Oracle manages capacity at no additional cost, as long as customers meet their spend commitment.
- On-premises services covered by the same SLAs as the public cloud with dedicated region Cloud@Customer offers the same exact SLAs for availability (99.95% uptime), manageability (API error rate), and performance (disk IOPS, network) as OCI public cloud.
Optimized for Oracle Workloads
While customers can deploy Oracle software on AWS, Oracle workloads run best on OCI. Customers are seeing tremendous benefits when migrating to OCI instead of AWS (see Pique Solutions: Workload Migration to the Cloud). For example: – OCI supports the latest and complete set of Oracle technologies such as Real Application Cluster (RAC), Exadata, and Autonomous Database. – Oracle workloads typically run faster and have superior cost/performance on OCI. – Oracle licenses required to run on AWS are 2X versus running on OCI – Oracle provides automated tools to ease the migration of Oracle Applications, Database, and Middleware to OCI. These tools (such as Oracle EBS Cloud Manager and PeopleSoft Cloud Manager) are not available on AWS. Only Oracle provides single vendor accountability and support for Oracle software, OCI IaaS, and Cloud at Customer deployment. Issues can be resolved quickly across all the layers of cloud without finger pointing.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure edge over AWS:
- Highest scalability for enterprise workloads up to 1,600 database server cores and up to 2.5 PB database size (without compression) with Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X8M
- Options to run a managed Oracle Database, OCI offers fully managed services for Oracle Database, including bare metal and VM database systems, Oracle Exadata database systems, and Autonomous Databases.
- The highest performance for Oracle workloads, Exadata Cloud Service X8M supports an industry-leading 12 million read and 5.6 million write IOPS
- Lowest TCO for Oracle Database and applications with Universal Credits and BYOL2PaaS to help customers bring their existing Oracle software licenses to OCI.
- Oracle RAC and Exadata for mission-critical workloads, OCI is the only cloud where customers can run fully supported advanced database options, such as Exadata and Oracle RAC, for scalability and high availability.
Conclusion
While running your critical workloads on Oracle might look convincing however to leverage superior price performance the cloud offers today, you can leverage IT Convergence, a Oracle cloud certified MSE partner one of the 12 in America, to consult, build, deploy and manage a customized cloud solution for you, with all services from Oracle under one single contract. Speak to our experts on how you can save cost and modernize your infrastructure, Today!
