Over the last couple of years I’ve been doing talks about running Oracle databases in the cloud. In both my talks and articles I refer to the Licensing Oracle Software in the Cloud Computing Environment document. This morning I was reading a post on a mailing list and someone mentioned the document had been updated on 23-Jan-2017 and contained two rather interesting changes.

The Good

The document now explicitly mentions the difference between how vCPUs are licensed on different cloud providers. On AWS a vCPU is one Intel hyper thread, so you need 2 vCPUs to make a real core. Azure does not use hyper threading on their boxes, so 1 vCPU equals a real core. The previous version of the document did not make this clear, so it read like you were paying per thread on AWS, even though people who used cloud-savvy partners understood this issue and paid correctly (vCPUs/2 on AWS).

The Bad

The document now says,

“When counting Oracle Processor license requirements in Authorized Cloud Environments, the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table is not applicable.”

Just digest that for a moment. The intel core factor is 0.5, so an 8 core physical box requires 4 cores of licensing. Now on the cloud, an 8 core VM (16 vCPUs on AWS or 8 vCPUs on Azure) requires 8 cores of licensing.

On the 23-Jan-2017 the intel core factor was removed from the cloud licensing calculation and overnight your cloud licensing costs doubled! WTF! 🙁

Update: For the new AWS bare-metal service, the core factor *should* still apply.

The same person also pointed out that in a MOS Note (Doc ID 2174134.1), last updated on 20-Aug-2016, Oracle pulled support for the Oracle Multitenant option from AWS EC2. WTF on a bike! 🙁 I assume they mean both non-CDB and Single Tennant (Lone-PDB) are still supported.

The Ugly

The reaction to this is going to be really bad! It’s getting really hard to remain an Oracle fanboy these days!

If you have been to one of my cloud talks over the last couple of years and you are basing your opinion on something you’ve heard me say, please remember things change. For those people I presented to at the UKOUG Database SIG on Tuesday, I’m sorry, but I was 2 days out of date on one slide. I’ve updated my slides and articles to reflect this change!

This is all so completely depressing!

Cheers

Tim…

PS. I’m not saying this policy document overrides your contracts. Just saying this is the most recent policy document produced by Oracle!

PPS. You might want to take a look at page 19 and the addendum on page 23 of this copy of the NoCOUG Journal.