October 26, 2016

AWS vs. Oracle Cloud: List of Services

Amazon Web Services vs. Oracle Cloud

This is the first of a 4-part blog series on AWS vs. Oracle Cloud. In this 4-post series, we will provide a side-by-side comparison of Oracle and Amazon’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing offerings. We only look at their public infrastructure cloud solutions. Our comparison examines important metrics such as the services offered by each vendor, and prices for the most commonly requested service: virtual machines. We also compare platform interfaces, service-level agreement (SLA) conditions, and customer support.

Breaking into the IaaS Market

As we wrote in a recent blog post, Oracle only entered the IaaS cloud business in 2015. Their reluctance was they believed doing so would cut into their software licensing fees. Oracle has a very strong and robust offering of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. Examples include Oracle Enterprise Performance Management, Enterprise Resource Planning, Human Capital Management, and more. Amazon does not offer these types of products in-market. Amazon, of course, is the largest public cloud company in the world with 31% market share at the end of 2015. Launching S3 object storage in 2006, they were the first to market with the cloud idea, stealing the thunder right out from under VMware, who did not realize that market until later. And Amazon hosts some of the largest and most well-known public clouds, including Netflix and SAP’s Hana cloud database. Oracle calls their virtual machine service the Oracle Compute Cloud Service. Amazon calls theirs Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute). Amazon calls their full suite of cloud products Amazon Web Services (AWS). Not only does that name distinguish from their e-commerce business—for which the company is known by the average book and cellphone shopper—it stresses the fact that customers can engage with most of their services using the web.