OCI Bare Metal Pricing

In the same vein as the VM shapes, the available OCI Bare Metal shapes that you can use are hardly a secret and are easily obtainable from the Oracle cloud website .

However I still find how they are displayed by Oracle as frustrating as the VM discussion previously.

As before there are a bunch of (essentially) deprecated BM shapes shown 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.

Starting with the Standard BM Instance type, again it’s actually almost a 50/50 split between shapes with and without an asterix – 2 out of 5 essentially should NOT be used. With the Dense IO type, it is exactly 50/50, 1/2 of the available types should NOT be used. I don’t encounter the HPC shapes, so will pass over those.

That doesn’t aid giving folks an easy overall understanding of what is available out there, and what they should be using.

Then the pricing table only shows the price per OCPU. Now I get this makes sense for the VM pricing as the same type can be provisioned with differing numbers of OCPU, but for the Bare Metal machines it is an all or nothing deal, you can’t provision half the OCPU on a bare metal machine.

Third, I still 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, and have to get my calculator out to multiply the per OCPU cost by the number of OCPU in the bare metal instance.

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.

I built another of my own little tables with the info that I want:

So essentially the available Bare Metal shapes boil down to the above, I’ve included the dense I/O BM shape which has 51.2 TB of NVMe devices. You always pay for the entirety of the OCPU in the machine, so I’m not convinced on the utility of displaying price per OCPU.

Graphically these look like:

Clearly you pay a lot for the DenseIO2 shape, 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 just like the VM case, it is clear the BM shapes with Intel CPUs are twice as expensive as the AMD types.

How favourably this compares to pricing on-premises is a discussion for another day!