In 2014, GeekWire reported about Moz CEO Sarah Bird’s blog post on why their company decided to move away from Amazon Web Services (AWS). One of the reasons she cited was the fact that AWS cost too much, so much that it was “killing” their margins, while also making their products rocky. They also found the cloud resources provider lacking. Bird also compared costs between setting up their own private cloud and AWS, and said setting up their own data center cost less than half than what they spent with AWS.
There is no doubt that AWS is a great cloud service provider, but you could end up spending too much on it. And here is where Oracle’s autonomous database can help.

Oracle has introduced the first autonomous database cloud in the world. It uses machine learning to help make data management easier, simpler, and headache-free. It automates a lot of your database related tasks, and allows you to save both money and time.

The Features

1. Self-driving: You no longer need to worry about provisioning, securing, and monitoring your database instances. It also handles backing up, recovering, performance tuning, and troubleshooting your database. All are done automatically. What’s more, it can scale storage and compute resources up and down without needing to take the database offline. This helps you save money as you are only using the resources you need.
2. Self-securing: All data that your database holds is automatically encrypted. You can even have automatic security updates, again with no downtime. There are also security features that protect your database from external and internal attacks.
3. Self-repairing: Your database can repair itself, making sure that there are no problems when there are planned or unscheduled downtimes.

It is easy to be attracted to Oracle’s autonomous database when it tunes itself, applies patches, and even back everything up while it is running. It helps to know that you are guaranteed that your databases will be online 99.9995% of the time, and that the 30 minutes when it is offline is because of a planned downtime. But what about savings on your AWS bills?

For one, Oracle’s autonomous database is priced way less than Amazon’s most budget-friendly plans. There are also different ways to pay and if you are already an Oracle user, you can use your existing license to help offset costs.

But the feature with the biggest impact when it comes to savings is the automatic provisioning of compute and processing resources. You are not wasting money on resources that you did not use, and you will not spend time and effort trying to figure out if you have enough resources or not. All of these resources are automatically provisioned.

With AWS, the resource and storage resources do not automatically expand when you need more capacity, and contract when you need less. You would need to shut down your database and deallocate and reallocate the storage, move your data from one place to another, and then increase or decrease the computer resources. After these, you would have to bring everything back up. Oracle does all these automatically and your database is not taken offline.

Oracle’s autonomous PaaS offerings also allows you to do things faster and more securely, which also contributes to the cost savings because you spend less this way than when you develop applications the old way.

Photo courtesy of Oracle.