Why Oracle Cloud

Infrastructure over Amazon

Web Services

November, 2021, Version 1.0

Copyright © 2021, Oracle and/or its affiliates
Public

1 / Why Oracle Cloud Infrastructure over Amazon Web Services / Version 0.1
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Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is built for enterprises seeking higher performance, lower costs, and easier cloud
migration for their applications. Customers choose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure over AWS for several reasons:
First, they can consume cloud services in the public cloud or within their own data center with Oracle
Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer. Second, they can migrate and run any workload as is on Oracle Cloud,
including Oracle databases and applications, VMware, or bare metal servers. Third, customers can easily
implement security controls and automation to prevent misconfiguration errors and implement security best
practices. Fourth, they have lower risks with Oracle’s end-to-end SLAs covering performance, availability, and
manageability of services. Finally, their workloads achieve better performance at a significantly lower cost with
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure than AWS. Take a look at what makes Oracle Cloud Infrastructure a better cloud
platform than AWS.

1. Deploy the same public cloud on-premises

Enterprises choose on-premises infrastructure to help meet their regulatory and data sovereignty requirements, to
minimize latency, and to ensure local control of resources. They want to leverage the attributes and benefits of the
public cloud while combining them with the isolation and security of on-premises infrastructure.
Oracle gives customers the choice to consume their cloud services in the public cloud or within their own data center
with Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer. Unlike AWS Outposts, Oracle brings its complete portfolio of public
cloud services into your data center so you can reduce costs, upgrade legacy applications with modern services, and
help address your most demanding data sovereignty and latency requirements. Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer
gives customers the best of both worlds.

CAPABILITY OCI AWS EVIDENCE

Oracle Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer is a completely managed cloud

region that brings all of Oracle’s public cloud services (and Oracle Fusion
Does your cloud SaaS applications) into a customer’s data center, helping address data
provider offer the sovereignty concerns. It enables autonomous operation to reduce human
exact same error and help maximize the security of your data. Dedicated Region
Yes No Cloud@Customer delivers truly elastic services, enabling the highest
services in your
data center as performance and reduced costs with low consumption-based cloud
their public cloud? subscription pricing—all while helping you meet your stringent latency
and regulatory goals when connecting to existing data center resources.
In contrast, only a limited set of services are available on AWS Outposts.

Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer uses the same billing model as public

Is your billing OCI, where customers only pay for what they use. Oracle manages
model for on- capacity at no additional cost, as long as customers meet their spend
premises commitment.
Yes No
deployment the With AWS Outposts, customers need to purchase racks and pay by the
same as the public rack—there is no pay-as-you-go pricing. Customers also need to pay for
cloud? installation, upgrades, and decommissioning. All capacity planning and
costs are the customer’s responsibility with AWS Outposts.

Are the on- Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer offers the same exact SLAs for
premises services availability (99.95% uptime), manageability (API error rate), and
covered by the Yes No performance (disk IOPS, network) as OCI public cloud.
same SLAs as the
public cloud? AWS does not offer any SLAs for AWS Outposts.

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 Customer Link “The choice was pretty simple – there was no other provider that provided the
Reference range of services that comes with the Oracle Dedicated Region. We believe we
can deliver a modern, scalable and secure solution to help address the
Australian government’s needs.”
— Rob Kelly, Managing Director, Australian Data Centers

2. Migrate Oracle workloads with confidence

Customers are increasingly migrating business-critical enterprise applications and databases to the cloud to achieve
operation efficiency and improve application performance and availability. Customers want to execute these
migrations without changing familiar software or IT processes. Unlike AWS, Oracle makes migrations easier.
Oracle Cloud provides the best deployment options, highest performance, best availability, and lowest costs for
Oracle databases and workloads. In the case of enterprise apps such as ERP, HCM, etc., Oracle offers customers the
ability to ramp-up to a SaaS model, something not possible with AWS as AWS does not offer any enterprise SaaS
application.

CAPABILITY OCI AWS EVIDENCE

Oracle Databases can scale to many times the compute and storage
capacity of AWS, up to 1,600 database server cores and up to 2.5 PB
The highest database size (without compression) with Oracle Exadata Cloud Service
scalability for X8M. Exadata Cloud Service X8M provides 1.6 PB PCI NVMe flash storage
Yes No
enterprise and up to 96 TB persistent memory.
workloads?
Amazon RDS for Oracle is limited to running databases that can only scale
to 96 vCPUs (equivalent to 48 OCPUs) and 64 TB in size.

OCI offers fully managed services for Oracle Database, including bare
metal and VM database systems, Oracle Exadata database systems, and
Options to run a Autonomous Databases.
managed Oracle Yes No Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Oracle has several
Database? limitations: it supports only SE1 and SE2 Oracle Database licenses, and
does not support Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), Oracle
Data Guard, and many other Oracle Database features.

The highest Oracle workloads have the highest performance running on OCI. Exadata
performance for Yes No Cloud Service X8M supports an industry-leading 12 million read and 5.6
Oracle workloads? million write IOPS. Amazon RDS for Oracle is limited to only 80,000 IOPS.

OCI provides the lowest TCO for Oracle Databases and applications. Oracle
offers Universal Credits and BYOL2PaaS to help customers bring their
existing Oracle software licenses to OCI. Oracle Bring Your Own License
The lowest TCO (BYOL) is 50% less on OCI than any other public cloud, including AWS.
for Oracle Oracle provides automation tools to ease the migration of Oracle
Yes No
Database and Applications, Database, and Middleware to OCI.
applications?
AWS does not offer Universal Credits or BYOL2PaaS for Oracle software.
The automation tools (such as Oracle EBS Cloud Manager and PeopleSoft
Cloud Manager) are not available on AWS.

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 OCI is the only cloud where customers can run fully supported advanced
database options, such as Exadata and Oracle RAC, for scalability and high
Oracle RAC and availability. Exadata Cloud Service offers the highest performance of any
Exadata for cloud database service. Oracle RAC offers capabilities that include
Yes No
mission-critical multicasting, UDP for networking, and shared host access to single block
workloads? volumes for the storage layer.
AWS has no similar offering to Exadata Cloud Service and Oracle RAC.

Customer Link “During the POC, OceanX observed meaningful performance differences
Reference building a Cognos cube on an Exadata platform versus on EC2. In AWS, an 11
million row cube took 40 minutes while a comparable 13 million row cube was
built on Exadata in 8 minutes. This allowed OceanX to save time and money by
eliminating the need to run each database on separate AWS instances”.

3. Migrate and run any workload as is, including those that need bare metal or VMware
On-premises, physical servers enable customers to run workloads directly on bare metal server hardware when
performance, latency, or security require it, and they want the same options in the public cloud. Most enterprises also
run VMware vSphere in their data centers. They want to migrate the workloads running on these physical servers and
VMware environments without rearchitecting applications, change familiar software or IT processes, or introduce
complexity to their operations. Oracle makes this easy; AWS does not.

CAPABILITY OCI AWS EVIDENCE

Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) provides a native VMware-based

cloud environment, installed within a customer’s tenancy. In OCVS,
customers own the ESXi root credentials, as they do with on-premises
deployments. Customers control whether—and when—to upgrade their
VMware solution VMware software. They have complete control with the same VMware
with full tools they’re accustomed to, and can keep the same VMware
Yes No
administrative provisioning, storage, and lifecycle policies in the cloud as they do on-
control? premises. OCVS supports up to 64-node VMware clusters.
VMware Cloud on AWS uses a least-privilege security model in which
customers do not have full administrative access and have no control
over when or how the underlying VMware software is upgraded.

Bare metal servers OCI offers the largest bare metal servers in the public cloud—up to 128
suitable for any cores, 2 TB of RAM, and 1 PB of storage. These servers are accessible
Yes No
enterprise with the same portal and tools, and live on the same networks with direct
application? access to other Oracle Cloud resources.

OCI high performance computing (HPC) bare metal compute instances

High performance have a unique direct memory interconnect for remote direct memory
bare metal servers access (RDMA) and fast, dense local storage, and the RDMA cluster
with local storage Yes No network provides < 2 microsecond latency across clusters of tens of
optimized for use thousands of cores.
cases like HPC?
RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE v2) is critical to the performance
of tightly coupled HPC workloads that depend on message passing (MPI)

4 / Why Oracle Cloud Infrastructure over Amazon Web Services / Version 0.1
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 to exchange data between cluster nodes during large, long-running
computations.
AWS doesn’t offer an equivalent architecture, and their closest solution,
the C5n, costs 44% more.

Oracle’s GPU-powered bare metal compute instances offer customers a

platform for machine learning, image processing, and massively parallel
GPUs on bare high-performance computing jobs. OCI BM.GPU4.8 shape provide 8
Yes No NVIDIA Tensor Core A100 GPUs, 8 x 200 RDMA networking, and 320 GB
metal servers?
of GPU memory.
AWS does not offer bare metal GPU instances and RDMA networking.

Customer Link “Altair delivers engineering simulations at its user’s fingertips by leveraging
Reference the flexibility and elasticity of cloud computing. Oracle Cloud can deliver up
to 20-25% better price performance for our CFD and Structural Mechanics
solvers with its bare metal compute offerings with low latency RDMA
networking. This helps our customer improve their product development
process and bring product to market faster that their competitors without
spending capital on upfront hardware purchase.”
—Sam Mahalingam, CTO, Altair

4. Simplify and automate security with our zero-trust approach

OCI is designed with a zero-trust, security-first architecture. Unlike AWS, OCI provides you with easy-to-implement
security controls and automation to prevent misconfiguration errors and implement security best practices. You can
secure your workloads and applications in OCI through a diverse portfolio of security services, including identity and
access management, data protection and encryption, unified security controls, infrastructure protection, incident
identification, remediation, and compliance services.

CAPABILITY OCI AWS EVIDENCE

OCI Security Zones provide a secure enclave within customer tenancies

Secure enclaves for the most sensitive workloads, where security is mandatory and always
within accounts on. This helps ensure compute, networking, storage, and database
for the most Yes No resources comply with security principles, such as always-on encryption,
sensitive no public access, and automated backups.
workloads? AWS does not offer any service or feature equivalent to OCI Security
Zones.

Do built-in Most cloud security failures result from misconfigurations and human
security posture error. Oracle Cloud Guard automatically detects security configuration
management issues across OCI services and can automatically alert administrators or
capabilities act directly to remediate issues. Cloud Guard is provided at no additional
provide Yes No cost.
prescriptive and
AWS Security Hub works with several other AWS services to gather
automated
security intelligence across many AWS services. While Security Hub
remediation of
provides a construct for enabling remediation, customers are responsible
findings?
for developing a customized response and remediation workflows, which,

5 / Why Oracle Cloud Infrastructure over Amazon Web Services / Version 0.1
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 in addition to the effort and operational overhead, may add additional
costs.

Security services
There are costs associated with using Security Hub and the underlying
are included
Yes No services including GuardDuty, Macie, and Inspector that are typically
without additional
difficult to anticipate.
costs?

Managing access policies can be extremely difficult as cloud

environments grow. OCI simplifies the process by always enforcing least
Easy management privilege and zero trust principles using compartments and SQL-like,
of access policies easy-to-understand identity and access management policies.
Yes No
at enterprise AWS relies on the tenancy as the primary security boundary. Customers
scale? must carefully manage access policies within a tenancy to create
separation between workloads. AWS’ JSON-based access policies are
much more cumbersome to work with at scale.

Customer Link “We were 95% moving to AWS. [But] at the end of the day, our Infrastructure
Reference team, our ERP team, our Project Management team voted—it was unanimous
for OCI”.
— Darren Owsley, CTO, Gonzaga University

5. Reduce risk with Oracle’s unique SLAs

Enterprises demand more than just availability from their cloud infrastructure. Mission-critical workloads also require
consistent performance, and the ability to manage, monitor, and modify resources running in the cloud at any time.
Only Oracle offers end-to-end SLAs covering performance, availability, manageability of services.

CAPABILITY OCI AWS EVIDENCE

The elasticity and configurability of infrastructure is part of why people

move applications to the cloud. Your services need to be manageable all
Manageability the time to deliver this benefit. Oracle provides manageability SLAs to
Yes No
SLAs? ensure your ability to manage, monitor, and modify resources.
AWS does not offer any manageability SLA.

It's not enough for your IaaS resources to be merely accessible. They
should consistently perform the way you expect them to. Oracle is the
Performance first cloud vendor to guarantee performance, so you can rely on our
Yes No
SLAs? infrastructure for enterprise applications.
AWS does not offer any financially-backed performance SLA.

6. Avoid AWS cost surprises

One of the most common issues faced by AWS customers is the AWS billing surprise, in which a customer receives a
bill and finds they owe more than they expected—and can’t easily figure out why.

6 / Why Oracle Cloud Infrastructure over Amazon Web Services / Version 0.1
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It happens because AWS pricing is complex, expensive at scale, and penalizes customers for hard to estimate usage
elements such as data transfer and storage performance, which involves taking volume size, provisioned IOPs, and
throughput into account for every volume.
AWS provides discounts for three-year commitments on products like compute, but ties those reserved instance
commitments to particular compute shapes, operating systems, and regions. While discounting can help win
business, the deployments are tying customers in to AWS-only services, and there’s no guarantee that pricing will be
there in the future.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides better performance at a significantly lower cost than AWS. Our pricing structure
is simple, predictable, and transparent, with none of surprises associated with AWS. Additionally, OCI charges the
same flat rate for all regions worldwide, which means there are no hidden cost variances if your business expands
globally.
Oracle also provides Universal Credits, which enable customers to use any Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or platform
service in any region at a significant savings, with a predictable monthly spend commitment. But just because your
spend is monthly, doesn’t mean your usage has to be: these credits don’t expire at the end of the month — they can
be used any time during their 12-month contract window.

CAPABILITY OCI AWS EVIDENCE

OCI offers industry-leading pricing, validated by independent- party

analysts. OCI standard, Intel-based VMs are up to 61% cheaper than
Industry-leading equivalent AWS instances, OCI block storage is up to 99% cheaper than
pricing for AWS EBS volumes and OCI data egress is up to 95% cheaper than AWS
compute, Yes No data egress (as of February 2020).
storage, and
networking? Comparison: AWS EC2 – M5 Linux On-Demand instances; Storage – EBS
General Purpose SSD storage, data egress calculated for 100 TB; all costs
from US East (Ohio) region, as of February 2020

OCI has consistent pricing throughout the world, enabling customers with
applications in multiple OCI regions to easily budget for cloud
expenditure.

Low, consistent In contrast, AWS charges different prices for the same resources in
Yes No different regions, increasing costs for customers running applications in
pricing globally?
multiple regions, especially outside the US. For example, an AWS
m5d.large (Linux, On-Demand) compute instance costs $0.113/hour in
the US East (Ohio) region, 29% more in Tokyo, and 59% more in Sao
Paulo (as of February 2020). Read this analyst paper for more details.

AWS has significantly higher data egress charges. With AWS, only the
first gigabyte is free. Oracle gives you 10,000 times more – charges don’t
Industry-leading start until after 10TB of data egress each month. Once charges begin,
low-cost data Yes No AWS charges for every GB at rates up to10 times higher than Oracle.
egress?
Applications that require a lot of data egress will see savings of up to 95%
on egress charges. See here for more details.

7 / Why Oracle Cloud Infrastructure over Amazon Web Services / Version 0.1
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 Leveraging isolated network virtualization, OCI provides near-bare-metal
performance without oversubscription of network, compute, or memory
Is the cloud resources. As a result, customers benefit from reduced jitter, lower
platform latency, higher packets-per-second, and lower CPU overhead. Customers
designed to can run their most important enterprise workloads on OCI knowing that
Yes No
deliver consistent they will get consistent and predictable performance.
and predictable
performance? AWS can deliver variable performance due to resource oversubscription
that can lead to “noisy neighbor” performance issues and limit the
viability of deployment of critical enterprise applications on AWS.

OCI supports flexible shapes, which enables you to customize the number
of OCPUs and the amount of memory granularly in 1 OCPU or 1 GB
increments when launching or resizing compute instances. Block
volumes can have their performance—and cost adjusted while remaining
Customizable up and running. This helps you precisely match resources to workloads,
compute shapes optimizing performance while minimizing cost. This is especially valuable
Yes No for applications with special needs like unusual core-to-memory ratios or
and storage
performance? expensive per-core software licensing.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) compute instances are
available in predefined sizes with no option to customize vCPU counts or
memory sizes. This implies that customers cannot optimize for
performance and minimize costs while choosing Amazon EC2 instances.

Save in costs over AWS with OCI. Oracle Support Rewards make OCI even
more affordable. For every dollar spent on OCI, Oracle reimburses up to
33 cents on license support. The program is valid for the duration of the
Rewards program
customer’s contract and can be extended upon renewal. Many customers
for cloud Yes No
have the potential to wipe out their support bill completely by migrating a
consumption?
handful of workloads.

AWS has no similar offering to Oracle Support Rewards.

Customer Link “As video meetings quickly became the connective tissue of today’s new
Reference world, we saw our user count soar. To support that exponential growth, we
looked at several platforms and chose Oracle Cloud infrastructure for its
strong security, outstanding price/performance, and world-class support”.
— Vik Verma, CEO, 8x8

Click here to start a free Oracle Cloud Infrastructure trial https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/

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