Report: Oracle doubles the cost to license its software for AWS

The next battle in Oracle’s ongoing war against Amazon Web Services (AWS), appears to be licensing.
This is the conclusion of a blog post by Tim Hall, a certified Oracle DBA. Hall noted recent changes to Oracle’s cloud license policies that could negatively impact users who use Oracle software on AWS. The Register, an IT news website, also noted Hall’s observations in a Monday article.
The issue is essentially about a change in Oracle’s method of counting each AWS virtual CPU (vCPU), for licensing purposes. AWS vCPUs are hyperthreads. This means that they only make up one half of an Intel core (in contrast to Microsoft Azure where a single CPU corresponds to a full core). AWS’ two-vCPU-per-core policy was included in earlier versions of Oracle’s licensing policy.
Hall pointed out that a Jan. 23 update of Oracle’s licensing policies document (.PDF hier) included this statement: “When counting Oracle Processor licence requirements in Authorized Cloud Environments. The Oracle Processor Core Factor Table does not apply.”
Hall argued that the change effectively doubles AWS’s cost to run Oracle software.
“The intel core factor of 0.5 means that an 8 core physical box requires four cores of licensing. He wrote that an 8 core virtual machine (vCPUs) on AWS or Azure requires 8 cores licensing. “On the 23 January 2017, [update], the intel core factor was removed form the cloud licensing calculation, and overnight your cloud license costs doubled!”
Users who wish to license Oracle solutions for use on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, (EC2) or the Amazon Relational Database Service, (RDS) will be subject to the new policy. It’s not yet clear if or how this policy change will affect existing contracts.
Oracle has made it clear that it intends to compete directly with AWS on Infrastructure as a Service. The company has spent the past months expanding its cloud portfolio. The company announced earlier this month that it plans to open three additional cloud regions by mid 2017, including one in London and one in Virginia — both of which are also regions of AWS.