OCI VM Shape Pricing

While the available OCI VM shapes that you can use is hardly a secret and is easily obtainable from the oracle cloud website I find it frustrating on several counts.

First there are bunch of (essentially) deprecated VM shapes in there. Every shape with an asterix next to it you are advised to only use, if you are already using them, and not to deploy new instances on those ones.

It’s actually almost a 50/50 split between shapes with and without an asterix. That doesn’t aid giving folks an easy overall understanding of what is available out there, and what they should be using.

Next, because the different OCPU sized VMs of the same type are all listed, it actually adds unnecessary length to the table. While the pricing table doesn’t do this, as the price scales with OCPU so it doesn’t need to display a bunch of redundant information – you know a 2 OCPU VM is going to cost you double the cost of the 1 OCPU of the same type.

Third, I find it mightily irritating having to have 2 browser tabs open to see what I can get and how much it is going to cost. The pricing table, doesn’t quite display enough info, while the description table doesn’t have the pricing. 😦

And finally, it doesn’t aid my understanding having a price in a per hour basis. Now, I know some folks might like that and intuitively understand what a good price per hour is, but in the Oracle world, it’s rare for production instances to be spun up on an hourly basis. They tend to be more at the 24×7 end of things. I accept test/dev/QA etc. can and should be different, but still I want to see pricing easily on a yearly basis.

To that end, I decided to build my own little table with the info that I want.

So essentially the available VM shapes boil down to the above, I’ve included the dense I/O VM shape which have NVMe devices. Pricing is always on a per OCPU basis, so clearly the more OCPU you need the higher your bill is going to be.

Graphically these look like:

Clearly you pay a lot for the DenseIO2 shapes, and you need a minimum of 8 OCPUs as well, so it is going to cost a lot in comparison to the other types. Also clear is the VM shapes with Intel CPUs are twice as expensive as the AMD types.

You might want to consider whether you are getting x2 the performance from the Intel silicon.