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Oracle Aims Cloud Cost Estimator at AWS
Oracle launched a cloud cost estimator that takes direct aim at consensus No. 1 cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS), finding -- perhaps unsurprisingly -- that "Oracle is a more cost-efficient (cheaper) option for many high-performance applications."
Officially called the Oracle Cloud Workload Cost Estimator, the tool was launched last month, aiming for as close to an apples-to-apples comparison as possible.
Such comparisons are difficult because of the wide range of services, pricing schemes, lack of direct correlating data and so on between cloud platforms.
"There are so many variables in CPUs, memory, storage, and network bandwidth that figuring out what your proposed workload will cost in the cloud can be an exercise in futility," Oracle acknowledged in an announcement post.
Nevertheless, the tool seeks to measure the cost of computing, storage, data input/output per second (IOPS) and date egress, or transmitting data out of the cloud. Oracle says that last factor is often called a "wild card" in such comparisons because "traditional cloud vendors charge hefty premiums on data flowing out." Those hefty premiums are enacted one egress flows reach a certain quantity.
Oracle claims an edge in this metric because its egress costs don't kick in until 10 TB of data flows out in a month, whereas AWS reportedly starts charging upon 1 GB of data per month.
Based on results of using the tool to assesses the price of resources needed to meet requirements before actual deployment, Oracle claims advantages in the following areas:
- Networking: charges for outbound bandwidth are 74 percent less than AWS
- Compute: Oracle exhibits 2x better price/performance over AWS for general purpose and memory-optimized instances
- High-performance computing (HPC): performance is similar between the two platforms, but AWS is 44 percent more expensive and provides no local SSDs, half the RAM, no RDMA networking and no performance service-level agreements (SLAs)
- Block storage: Oracle offers up to 20x the IOPs performance of AWS for less than half the price
[Click on image for larger view.] Oracle Cloud Workload Estimator (source: Oracle).
AWS offers its own tools to estimate cloud costs, including the AWS Pricing Calculator and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculators.
Other firms have also gotten in on the cloud cost comparison action, going back to 2016 when we reported on the "Cost Calculator for Private Cloud with the Public Cloud Comparison" from CloudPhysics. Other tools compare services -- not costs -- as detailed in last year's coverage of a Cloud Comparison Tool from Wire19.com that joined several alternative options.
Other third-party cost comparison tools abound, with a few examples coming from:
As far as overall cloud computing rankings, last year we reported that research firm Gartner found that AWS dominated its cloud infrastructure "Magic Quadrant" report for the ninth year in a row, as AWS joined Microsoft and Google in the "Leaders" quadrant, while Oracle, Alibaba and IBM were in the "Niche Players" quadrant.
About the Author
David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.