Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s distributed cloud is built for mission-critical enterprise workloads, with all services available in public, sovereign, and on-premises deployments at a lower price.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) consistently charges less than Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the equivalent compute capacity. For a typical 4 vCPU AMD-based virtual machine with 16 GB of memory (m6a.xlarge), AWS charges more than 2X as much in its cheapest US region.
Even compared with the cost when using an AWS compute savings plan, which requires a commitment of at least a year, OCI is still cheaper.
OCI Compute offers flexible virtual machines that let you scale performance and capacity by a single core. Flexible VMs allow you to pay only for the compute you need, scaling as necessary, rather than being forced to purchase fixed sizes that might be too big for your workload.
AWS doesn’t offer flexible sizing for its EC2 instances—you must pick from their existing sizes. As you require more performance, the difference between sizes increases dramatically. If your needs fall between sizes, you must choose either an undersized instance type or an oversized, and more expensive, instance type.
OCI Block Storage provides high performance volumes that are attached to virtual machines. OCI not only lets you change the performance characteristic of block volumes during active use, but it also allows you to set up elastic performance so the volumes dynamically change performance based on actual use.
AWS requires you to pick from multiple options with different capacity, performance, and cost characteristics. For the equivalent capacity and performance, OCI Block Storage is cheaper than the multiple options from AWS. For example, for a 5 TB volume with the 375,000 IOPS that a high performance database could require, AWS charges 35X as much (based on io2 pricing) in their cheapest region while only providing 256,000 IOPS.
We believe in letting customers move their data. OCI charges significantly less than AWS for data leaving a cloud region using the public internet.
For 50 TB of data egress from a US region in one month, AWS charges almost 13X as much as OCI.
In addition, OCI includes the first 10 TB of data egress using the public internet per month at no additional charge. AWS only includes 100 GB, which is 1% of what OCI provides.
OCI has globally consistent pricing. We designed OCI for a consistent experience, both in performance and cost, wherever you want to deploy. If you run applications and workloads in multiple regions, this makes it easier to plan and budget for cloud expenditure.
This also holds true for on-premises deployments of OCI Dedicated Region, which has the same per-service pricing as public regions. A minimum commitment is required.
In contrast, AWS charges differently in different regions for the same instance types, which makes it costlier to run applications in multiple regions, especially outside the US. Comparing the costs of a typical 4 vCPU AMD-based virtual machine with 16 GB of memory (m6a.xlarge), AWS charges more than 2X as much in its eu-west-2 (London) region and almost 4X as much in its sa-east-1 (Brazil) region as it does in its us-east-1 region.
OCI offers simpler pricing models for its cloud services. Compute is priced by the number of processor cores and amount of memory. Block storage is priced based on the amount of data and desired performance. Network data egress fees are charged when data moves outside a region, and the first 10 TB per month is included at no additional charge.
Many services are included at no additional charge, such as secrets on OCI Vault, OCI Vulnerability Scanning Service, Oracle Cloud Guard, and distributed denial-of-service protection. This reduces your overall spend and makes it simpler to plan your budget.
AWS charges for its multiple GuardDuty security protection plans, including the S3, EKS, malware, RDS, and Lambda protection plans. Data movement fees can be charged depending on whether the data is moving between virtual machines, to particular AWS services, inside a region, or between Availability Zones. Other networking services, such as Direct Connect, have per-hour and per-byte charges that you need to plan for. Unexpected usage can lead to surprises on your bill.
Achieve multicloud deployment success with OCI and AWS
OCI offers a sovereign region in the EU to help EU customers meet their requirements for location, access, data residency, and operational controls while still having access to all 100-plus cloud services—including AI—that are available in OCI public regions.
OCI sovereign regions are physically, logically, and cryptographically separated from public regions, with independent access, accounts, operations, and support. They’re operated and supported by personnel who meet the regional requirements, which can include residency and clearance status. Per-service pricing is the same across commercial, sovereign, and government regions.
AWS only operates public and government regions. It doesn’t plan to open its first sovereign region until the end of 2025. In AWS public regions, sovereignty requirements can be addressed using controls and policies, but the regions are still part of the shared, public infrastructure.
AWS does offer AWS Outposts, which can address data residency needs, but it doesn’t offer all the services available in public AWS regions and it requires a connection to a nearby AWS public region.
AWS also offers Local Zones in areas where there are no public regions, but Local Zones offer only a subset of the services that are available in public regions and they’re always connected to a “parent” public region. Local Zones are designed for workloads that require low-latency connectivity, not digital sovereignty.
OCI offers government regions, currently available for the US, UK, and Australia, to help government customers and their partners meet their sovereignty and security requirements. Government regions offer all 100-plus cloud services—including AI—that are available in OCI public regions. Per-service pricing is the same across commercial, sovereign, and government regions.
OCI government regions are physically, logically, and cryptographically separated from public regions, with independent access, accounts, operations, and support. They’re operated and supported by personnel that meet the regional requirements, which can include residency and clearance status.
AWS does operate government regions but only in the US. The next government-only region should be the Top Secret cloud region in Australia, but no timeline has been published. AWS also operates with various certifications from the UK government, but these capabilities still run on the public, shared infrastructure.
AWS does offer AWS Outposts, which can address data residency needs, but it doesn’t offer all the services available in public AWS regions and it requires a connection to a nearby AWS public region.
AWS also offers Local Zones in areas where there are no public regions, but Local Zones offer only a subset of the services that are available in public regions and they’re always connected to a parent public region. Local Zones are designed for workloads that require low-latency connectivity, not digital sovereignty.
OCI offers national security regions, currently available for the US, to help government customers with classified workloads meet their access and security requirements. National security regions offer all 100-plus cloud services—including AI—that are available in OCI public regions.
OCI national security regions are physically, logically, and cryptographically separated from public regions, with independent access, accounts, operations, and support. They’re operated and supported by personnel that meet the regional requirements, which can include residency and clearance status.
AWS operates national security–specific regions in the US. The next national security–specific region should be the Top Secret cloud region in Australia, but no timeline has been published. AWS also operates with various certifications from the UK government, but these capabilities still run on the public, shared infrastructure.
OCI offers its complete line of more than 100 services in 40-and-growing public regions and 10 sovereign and government regions. For customers who need even more flexibility in choosing where and how cloud services are delivered to address their regulatory, performance, and other needs, OCI’s distributed cloud delivers all the same services as its public cloud—including AI—to customer data centers and edge locations. Per-service pricing is the same across commercial, sovereign, and government regions as well as OCI Dedicated Region.
AWS offers additional locations through Local Zones, which are located in major population areas that don’t already have a public region. However, Local Zones offer only a small subset of the services available in public regions and are designed for low-latency connectivity and local processing. Local Zones are always connected to a parent public region and can’t provide digital sovereignty. Pricing for services in Local Zones is different than in public regions.
AWS also offers Outposts and Dedicated Local Zones that run in an on-premises data center, but they both offer only a small subset of the services available in public regions.
Oracle Alloy is a complete cloud infrastructure platform that lets partners become cloud providers and offer a full range of more than 100 cloud services to expand their businesses while keeping control of data residency. Partners control the commercial and customer experience of Oracle Alloy—including branding—and can customize it to address their specific market needs.
AWS offers Dedicated Local Zones, which a business could use to provide services to its customers, but these zones only provide a small subset of the services that are available in public regions. Pricing for services in Local Zones is different than in public regions.
Oracle Compute Cloud@Customer is a fully managed, rack-scale distributed cloud platform that lets you use OCI Compute anywhere. Gain the benefits of cloud automation and economics in your data center by running OCI Compute with storage and networking services on Compute Cloud@Customer.
Compute Cloud@Customer offers the same flexible virtual machine shapes with the same APIs as are available in OCI public regions, with the same consumption pricing. And you can manage Compute Cloud@Customer through the same OCI Console portal.
AWS offers Outposts which runs in an on-premises data center and can be configured with primarily compute resources. However, not all EC2 instance types and sizes are available. Pricing for services on Outposts is different than in public regions.
AWS also offers Outpost Servers that are just the servers themselves for an on-premises deployment. However, the configurations are limited to 1U AWS Graviton or 2U Intel Xeon processors, which support only the C6gd and C6id instance types.
Oracle Exadata Cloud@Customer brings the performance, automation, and economics of Oracle Exadata Database Service and the fully managed Oracle Autonomous Database into enterprise data centers. It’s the simplest way for you to start using our cloud database resources in your data center, helping you address strict data residency requirements. And you can manage Exadata Cloud@Customer through the same OCI Console portal.
AWS offers AWS Relational Database Service on Outposts, which runs in an on-premises data center, but it doesn’t offer all database engines—notably, Oracle Database isn’t offered. Pricing for services on Outposts is different than in public regions.
Oracle Cloud VMware Solution provides a native VMware-based cloud environment, installed within a customer’s tenancy with support. With this solution, you own the ESXi root credentials, as you do with on-premises deployments.
You can connect to ESXi hosts to troubleshoot and remediate issues, just as you can on-premises. You can set affinity rules, define relationships between virtual machines and hosts to improve failover, turn encryption on or off, enable or disable vSAN compression and deduplication to expand capacity, and control patches and updates on your schedule.
Full administrative control lets you capitalize on the existing expertise of your VMware staff without requiring training or new processes.
VMware Cloud on AWS uses a least-privilege security model in which customers don't have full administrative access and have no control over when or how the underlying VMware software is upgraded.
Choose how you migrate your workloads to Oracle Cloud VMware Solution based on your requirements and configuration. You can create a new Oracle Cloud VMware Solution software-defined data center (SDDC) in about three hours and add a cluster to an existing SDDC in just 30 minutes.
Use VMware HCX for complex migration projects. And use vMotion between VMware vCenter Servers to migrate your smaller workloads.
You have complete control. You can use the same VMware tools you’re accustomed to, and you can keep the same VMware provisioning, storage, and lifecycle policies in the cloud as you do on-premises.
All of this contributes to a lower migration risk.
Choose from almost 50-and-growing OCI commercial, government, and sovereign regions—or an OCI Dedicated Region in your data center. Scale business-critical applications across the globe. And deliver disaster recovery for workloads on VMware where you need to.
VMware Cloud on AWS is available in fewer than 25 regions and not all features are supported in those regions. Local Zones don't support VMware Cloud on AWS.
In addition, customers can no longer purchase VMware Cloud on AWS from AWS and must instead purchase from Broadcom. Customers are also no longer able to renew through AWS. This may increase the cost, and purchases will likely no longer apply toward AWS committed spending contracts.
OCI offers comparable compute performance at less than half of the cost of compute on AWS without requiring Reserved Instances (RIs), EC2 Instance Savings Plans, or Compute Savings Plans. This gives you the flexibility to scale your capacity on OCI and even move capacity to different regions without impacting your pricing model or being contractually obligated to pay for capacity you can’t use.
Reserved Instances on AWS offer savings on EC2 costs in exchange for a commitment to pay for EC2 compute for a one- or three-year term, regardless of actual usage. RIs only apply a discount to your bill if you run an EC2 instance that matches all of the selected parameters: instance type (including size), region, tenancy (shared or dedicated), and platform (for example, Windows or Linux/Unix). If your computing needs change, you’re contractually committed to the reservation and have limited options to modify the RI parameters.
Savings Plans on AWS, which are now promoted over RIs, offer lower prices for AWS compute instances in exchange for a commitment to pay a consistent amount per hour for a one- or three-year term. EC2 Instance Savings Plans apply only to an individual instance family in a region, while Compute Savings Plans apply to EC2 usage regardless of instance family, size, availability zone, region, platform, or tenancy. They also apply to Fargate and Lambda usage. However, just like RIs, if your computing needs change, you’re contractually committed and will be unable to change the Savings Plan.
OCI offers the largest bare metal servers in the public cloud—up to 192 cores, over 2 TB of RAM, and 1 PB of storage. These native servers are accessible with the same portal and tools and live on the same networks with direct access to other Oracle Cloud resources. Bare metal servers work well for workloads that need access to high performance, have licensing requirements, or need fast networking interconnections for cluster-based software.
AWS offers more than 60 instance types of bare metal servers (metal) that customers must choose from based on their characteristics, options, constraints, availability, and pricing. The X2i family offers 2 TB or 4 TB RAM options, but with less than half as many cores as OCI (128 vCPUs equals 64 cores) and a maximum of 3.8 TB of local SSD storage versus up to 81 TB of local SSD storage on OCI.
Support for OCI services is included with your consumption of the service. This includes mission-critical support for production workloads.
AWS only provides Basic Support with consumption. Business, Enterprise On-Ramp, and Enterprise Support tiers require a monthly fee plus a percentage of all your cloud spending. This means that your support fee has no limit and can increase, even if you never take advantage of it. There’s also an additional charge for AWS Incident Detection and Response.
OCI’s availability SLA is consistent across all deployment options, including sovereign regions, government regions, and OCI Dedicated Region.
AWS doesn’t acknowledge an availability SLA for Local Zones, Outposts, or Dedicated Local Zones.
The elasticity and configurability of infrastructure is one reason people move applications to the cloud. Your services need to be manageable at all times to deliver this benefit. We provide manageability SLAs to help you maintain your ability to manage, monitor, and modify resources.
AWS doesn’t offer a manageability SLA.
It's not enough for your IaaS resources to be merely accessible—they should consistently perform the way you expect them to. We’re the first cloud vendor to guarantee performance, so you can rely on our infrastructure for enterprise applications.
AWS doesn’t offer a financially backed performance SLA
Oracle Cloud spans 50 interconnected geographic commercial and government cloud regions. Unlike other providers, each region offers a consistent set of more than 100 Oracle Cloud Infrastructure services, with consistent low pricing worldwide. For more complete support of customer cloud strategies, Oracle Cloud also offers a full suite of Oracle Cloud Applications and direct interconnection with Microsoft Azure.
Oracle data centers are distributed around the world.
Region | Current Regions | Regions Coming soon | Azure Interconnect |
---|---|---|---|
North America | 13 | 0 | 4 |
South America | 5 | 0 | 1 |
Europe | 15 | 0 | 3 |
Middle East & Africa | 6 | 2 | 1 |
Asia Pacific | 10 | 0 | 3 |
* All comparisons were performed on June 11, 2024.