Over the last couple of years, I have had the opportunity to write a number of articles for the quarterly journal of the Northern California Oracle Users Group (NoCOUG). The topics have mostly been about Oracle licensing in cloud environments, with a brief foray into general software asset management (SAM) considerations for Oracle software.
I have found it useful to share these articles with people outside the NoCOUG circle. I figured it would be a good idea to share them publicly for anyone interested in a deep dive on Oracle licensing in the cloud. While some of the material is dated, the key concepts remain the same and relevant… as do Oracle’s non-contractual “policies”! So, over the next few weeks, I’ll share these articles with a brief summary of the content, and any relevant comments to bring things up to date if needed.
The first installment deals with Oracle licensing in third party clouds, with examples from AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Go ahead and read on here.
“Oracle Licensing in the Cloud”, February 2017 (Pages 19-23)
I wanted to mention two key points to keep in mind:
- Oracle made a major policy change just as the article was heading to the printer. Note the addendum at the end of the article.
- When counting vCPUs, cores, and virtual cores in cloud environments – especially when dealing with shared tenancy environments – even applying the contractual definition of the “Processor” metric is difficult. In some cases, it may be necessary to consider Oracle’s policy as an option as a middle ground. This is discussed further in coming articles which I’ll be sharing in this series.
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