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Image: Oracle Changes Licensing Rules for ‘Authorized Cloud Environments’

In January 2017, Oracle changed the license consumption calculations for their set of ‘authorized cloud environments’ which includes Amazon Web Services – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Microsoft Azure Platform. Under the new rules, you must now count as follows:

  • Amazon EC2 and RDS:
    • count two vCPUs as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper-threading is enabled, and
    • one vCPU as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license if hyper-threading is not enabled.
  • Microsoft Azure: count one Azure CPU Core as equivalent to one Oracle Processor license.

Also, the Oracle Core Factor Table no longer applies when calculating license consumption in authorized cloud environments.

What affect does this set of changes have on your costs?

As noted in this article on The Register: Oracle effectively doubles license fees to run its stuff in AWS, it can double your costs, in some cases. The costs don’t change if you are running Oracle programs with Standard Edition One, Standard Edition 2, or Standard Edition in the product name in an AWS environment. In this case, the calculation is the same as before:

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Authorized Cloud Environment instances with four or fewer Amazon vCPUs, or two or fewer Azure CPU Cores, are counted as 1 socket, which is considered equivalent to an Oracle processor license. For Authorized Cloud Environment instances with more than four Amazon vCPUs, or more than two Azure CPU Cores, every four Amazon vCPUs used (rounded up to the nearest multiple of four), and every two Azure CPU Cores used (rounded up to the nearest multiple of two) equate to a licensing requirement of one socket.

The costs can double in cases where you are running, for example, Oracle Database Enterprise Edition on vCPUs where hyper-threading is not enabled, since now one vCPU equates to one Oracle Processor license, instead of equating to only half a Processor license.

The costs can also increase in cases where you are running on processors that have a core factor of less than 1. For example, if the core factor was 0.5 under the old rules, it is ignored under the new rules and your costs double.