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by rohan404 2913 days ago
One of the major issues we've seen with our customers is that many of them (especially startups and SMBs/SMEs) don't have the ability to dedicate a team to just managing their RI capacity. We've also seen enterprise customers optimizing up to 70% of their EC2 usage, but many of them have trouble ensuring a level of utilization due to rapidly changing infrastructure. I'd definitely argue that GCP has a better model for some use cases as it requires less active effort for optimizing billing, however if you manage your RIs on AWS effectively you can often get a better price. Looks like Azure has also gone down the same route as AWS, which is quite an interesting move on their part.

Disclosure: I head engineering/devOps at Engineer.ai - one of our products Cloudops.ai allows our customers to save up to 15% of their AWS bill without making RI purchases, as well as get discounted prices and additional flexibility (custom lock-in periods) for RIs they do wish to purchase. Feel free to reach out for information - my email address is in my about section.

1 comments

Disclosure: I am a PM on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

I am aware that AWS and GCP are the go-to options for this audience, and that Oracle isn’t particularly favored for the Java lawsuit (among other things). If you are able to set these grievances aside, the OCI pricing team has done something unique: they have created a means by which you can effectively buy credits from Oracle and use them for whatever service (current or future) you need. It is called the Universal Credits Model (UCM) [1].

If you anticipate usage above a certain threshold, tier-based discounts are available at the time of purchase. It’s like a store gift card; buy whatever you want. This takes away some of the stress of capacity planning and instance-type selection. Additionally, you can adopt new services and avail lower prices in the future.

With UCM, customers:

1. Sign one single contract that provides unlimited access to all current and future Oracle PaaS and IaaS services (Compute, DB, Block Storage, Blob Storage, Network, etc.) spanning both Oracle Cloud and Oracle Cloud at Customer. 2. Gain on-demand access to all services plus the benefit of the lower cost of pre-paid services. Depending on the projected spend, customers can negotiate discounts. 3. Possess the flexibility to upgrade, expand or move services across datacenters based on their requirements. 4. Have the freedom to switch PaaS or IaaS services they are using without having to notify Oracle. 5. Can adopt new services when they GA.

Please send any questions my way, and I will get answers to you.

(1) https://www.oracle.com/cloud/bring-your-own-license/faq/univ...