Oracle this month announced a new form of billing for Compute Instance and Autonomous Database with that the Oracle Cloud has a stronger platform for legacy applications moving to cloud and a new family of cloud native applications that rely on microservices and dynamic scaling.

Compute instances are now billed per second of usage, rather than per hour. This helps you reduce costs when using instances for short amounts of time. Virtual machine (VM) instances have a minimum charge of one minute. Bare metal instances have a minimum charge of one hour. After the first minute (for VMs) or the first hour (for bare metal instances), usage is billed in one-second increments.

With this billing model, usage of Compute and Autonomous Database is billed per-second. All prices continue to be quoted on an hourly basis.

Here are some details about this billing model:

• All virtual machine (VM) Compute instances, including those with graphical processing unit (GPU) chips, are now billed per-second with a one-minute minimum.

• All bare metal Compute instances, including those with GPU chips, are now billed per-second with a one-hour minimum.

• Autonomous Data Warehouse and Autonomous Transaction Processing usage is now billed per-second with a one-minute minimum.

• Windows OS images are now billed per-second with a one-minute minimum.

• Microsoft SQL Server images available in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace are now billed per-second with a 744-hour (one month) minimum.

The workloads that will see the biggest impact from this change are those that stop and start frequently, and those that run for short durations. Here are some examples of significant benefits:

• Application and database development

• High-performance computing

• Continuous integration/continuous development(CI/CD)

• Big boost to Cloud Native applications – Microservices & Dynamic Scaling

I believe that with this, Oracle increasingly invests and provides more resources and different ways for its customers to be able to plan and prepare their environments for the cloud.

Reference: https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/

I hope this short article has helped.

Andre Ontalba

Disclaimer: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent my actual employer positions, strategies or opinions. The information here was edited to be useful for general purpose, specific data and identifications were removed to allow reach the generic audience and to be useful for the community.”