Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) offers services for less than Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. We’ve covered the simplified, customer-friendly pricing strategy previously. Now, we’ve updated our Cloud Economics page to go into more detail on the pricing differences across numerous infrastructure services, which is important as you plan your budget.
In this post, we look at some pricing comparisons. We use public, on-demand pricing to level the field.
Virtual machine pricing
Virtual machines (VMs) are an important component of many applications, either directly or as part of other services, such as Kubernetes. For ease of comparison, we chose a medium size with four vCPUs, although the comparison holds at other sizes. When we perform comparisons, we typically select the lowest cost region for other cloud providers to provide a balanced assessment. However, not everyone runs in the US regions. So, let’s look at regions globally.
For a month, OCI costs a little over US$50. OCI charges the same rate in all regions, even US Government. Other cloud providers are over $100, except for India, where it’s pretty close. When you move into Europe or Asia Pacific, their monthly cost goes up to about $150. If you need the service in South America, be prepared to pay about $200—that’s four times OCI.
OCI is about 50% cheaper when compared in the most favorable region, and then the savings increase as we look at other regions. Consistent pricing across all regions makes it simpler to forecast your budget as you move and replicate workloads.
The Cloud Economics page also shows a comparison of bare metal instances, although we only provide a comparison with AWS because neither Azure and Google Cloud publish their bare metal pricing.
Data egress pricing
Everyone moves data. All cloud providers have a public connection to the internet. Fees are charged based on the amount of data moving from a cloud provider. This egress also covers data moving between regions within the same cloud provider, although it might include lower pricing, depending upon the scenario.
In the previous post, we reviewed data egress fees for a public connection. In the updated Cloud Economics page, we also include pricing for private line, which is a dedicated connection between your site and the cloud provider. A dedicated connection is warranted when you need a fast and consistent data movement experience, such as between applications. For our comparison, we chose a 10-Gbps bandwidth private line.
Unlike public internet connectivity, private lines can incur two different costs: A per-hour port charge and a per-byte transit fee. We exclude the cost of your telecommunications carrier because it’s customer-dependent. When pricing a private line, you have the source region and where your telecommunications carrier connects to the cloud provider.
We selected a range of use cases that establish a private line from a non-US location back to the US. We then compared at different usage levels: Consuming 30% of the line, which is about 1 PB, 50% (about 1.5 PB), and 75% (about 2.5 PB). An interesting wrinkle is that Azure has two different billing models: A per-byte charge or an unlimited flat rate. We gave them the benefit and chose the cheaper rate in all cases.
The costs can be dramatic, except for OCI. It’s a bit difficult to see the bar for OCI because it’s a consistent $931 per month. OCI doesn’t charge for data transit, only a per-hour port charge. This model contrasts markedly with the other cloud providers.
Block storage pricing
All cloud providers provide dependable and economical object storage, but high performance applications require block storage. Block storage is attached to your VM or bare metal instances. Databases and cluster-based software need high bandwidth and high throughput that only block storage can provide.
You can scale up block storage performance for more demanding workloads, but the method depends upon the cloud provider. Some scale performance as the storage capacity is increased, whether you require more storage capacity. OCI enables you to select your performance independent of storage capacity, so you pay for what you need.
When there are multiple options on the other cloud providers, we chose the cheapest that meets both the storage capacity and performance. This choice contributes to higher costs at the high end of the use cases, but you experience these costs regardless. For simplicity, we used the cheapest region on all the cloud providers for the comparison.
Again, OCI is significantly cheaper, even while providing the same storage capacity and performance. For the other cloud providers, we can see a definite curve, and it’s significantly more expensive.
Azure looks relatively cheap, but it has a caveat. Azure’s Premium SSDv2 is limited to 80K IOPS. While it’s similar in cost for the first two use cases, it can only provide about 20% of the needed performance for the final use case.
Ready to start saving money?
The Cloud Economics page has a few more comparisons, and they tell the same story: OCI provides core infrastructure services for significantly less. You can use the Cost Estimator to see what you might pay for your workloads.
When you’re ready, sign up for an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure account and get started!