Oracle Licensing Costs on AWS, Self Managed vs RDS
When you move your Oracle database to AWS there are a number of ways to handle licensing. You can either:
- Bring your own licenses for a self managed Oracle installation on an EC2 instance
- Bring your own licenses for an Oracle Relational Databases Service instance
- Use pay as you go licensing for an Oracle Relational Database Service instance
Of course you need to be sure that you’re getting best value from your licenses – in answer to some frequent questions we’ve put together the example below so you can see how the options stack up and use the same method for your own analysis. In all cases we’re looking at a database running 24/7/365 on an m4.xlarge instance size. The instance size we’ve chosen is an m4.xlarge, a 4vCPU instance – this maps to 2 virtual cores and requires 1 Oracle CPU license due to the 0.5 core factor in place for Intel systems.
Item | Base Cost | Five Year Cost | Monthly Equivalent | |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 BYO, EC2 | EC2 m4.xlarge | $0.264 per hour | $11,563 | $193 |
Oracle License (Standard Edition) 1 CPU | $12,250 five year term | $12,250 | $204 | |
Oracle Maintenance | $3,850 per year | $19,250 | $321 | |
Monthly Total | $718 | |||
2 BYO, RDS | RDS db.m4.xlarge | $0.386 per hour | $17,611 | $293 |
Oracle License (Standard Edition) 1 CPU | $12,250 five year term | $12,250 | $204 | |
Oracle Maintenance | $3,850 per year | $19,250 | $321 | |
Monthly Total | $818 | |||
3 PAYG, RDS | RDS db.m4.xlarge | $0.920 per hour | $40,296 | $671 |
Monthly Total | $671 |
So managing your own instance is just $100 less than having AWS manage the instance for you. This is a good deal! That management includes backups, patching and disaster recovery all of which would need management and in the case of backups and DR additional IaaS resources to complete.To get all that managed in house for less than $100 you’ll need to have some serious scale in IT operations so that’s probably just for the very largest of Oracle customers.Even more interesting is that buying a pay as you go license this brings the monthly cost down to $671 per month, and with no up-front costs.There are a couple of things to point out here, firstly the Oracle license is perpetual so the longer you keep it the less the total cost of ownership becomes (as long as you keep paying the maintenance) so if you ran this comparison across 6 or 7 years youd see the license ownership option approach the pay as you go pricing. Secondly, we know that many Oracle customers get a discount on the up front perpetual license cost (although not the maintenance payments) so if you get a discount you’d need to adjust the figure above and to reflect that.In conclusion, if you plan to use Oracle for her 6 or 7 years or if you can get a 30%+ discount from Oracle then it’s worth looking at owning your own license, if you can’t then you should avoid the up front cost and go with the AWS pay as you go option. In either case if you can use the managed RDS service from AWS this is looking like a very good deal especially for mid market customers where the overhead of database management is a large part of the cost of IT ownership.**Updated** Licensing for Oracle in the cloud changed in January 2017. We won’t be updating this blog entry but we will be producing a new update to advise on best practice following the change
References:
EC2 Pricing
RDS Pricing
Instance type to virtual core mapping
Oracle Pricing