Oracle Cloud Infrastructure - A Cloud That Tells You How to Save Money!
When I talk to customers, their first reaction about OCI is the savings that Oracle's IaaS can offer them. Sometimes it can be as much at HALF as what the other major CSPs are charging the customer, especially with my Public Sector customers, that pay a premium for services because they need special security that only a "Government" cloud can provide. With OCI, they pay the same price as commercial customers, saving them considerable expense. This is because OCI was built for the demanding security that government customers required and simply extended that same secure architecture to commercial customers, hence the same price.
What is even more of a surprise to customers is that OCI has a built-in tool to identify ways customers can reduce their cloud consumption! Yup, that's right… Imagine if your Cloud Servicer Provider (CSP) had a tool that told you how to reduce your organization's spend! To make it even better, it is a FREE tool!
The tool is called the Cloud Advisor, and it is accessible from the Main Menu, under Governance and Administration.
When you select the tool, you will be presented with the status of your cloud, showing both a spending and security report. In the sample, it is showing Fair security and a potential savings of $101 a month. Yup, the cloud just told me I could reduce my spend and save!
You can drill down into either the security of the savings for more details. In this case, let's look at the savings and click on the "details" option.
You will then be presented with a list of all the recommended areas that you can use to identify cost savings. Then, for each of the items, you can click to see the actual details. In this case, the largest savings is in the unattached block volumes, so let's drill down there.
Here you can see a list of block volumes that are not attached to any VM. It is not uncommon in cloud environments for VMs to be deleted and the block volumes left untouched. Sometimes it is done by design, but more often, a broken automation script, or by a cloud admin that forgets to click the delete volume button when deleting a VM. From here, you can delete the volumes, but I would always recommend reaching out to the owner to make sure they didn't need the data.
With this Cloud Advisor, you can find savings like this and more. It is a great tool that will help your organization realize some true cost savings.
If you are interested in learning more about Oracle Cloud as an option for your agency or organization, the Mythics Oracle Cloud Viability Assessment (CVA) is a great starting point to help us guide and collaborate with you to select the right cloud approach that fits your requirements, budget and unique environment or security needs. Mythics can help architect, securely migrate, and provide ongoing sustainment services to help maximize success.
If you are further along in your Oracle Cloud research and journey, we also have service bundles that can help jump-start an Oracle Cloud evaluation, implementation, and workload or application migration. Contact the Oracle experts at Mythics today!
Erik Benner, Vice President Enterprise Transformation, Mythics