What are ECPUs in the Oracle world?
As if there are not enough acronyms in the Oracle world, there is another new one — ECPU (Elastic CPU). So, what is an ECPU?
ECPUs are the new billing metric that Oracle applies to workloads in the Oracle Cloud platform.
An ECPU is determined by the number of cores ‘elastically’ allocated from a shared pool of Exadata database and storage servers — it is the new billing metric that Oracle applies when allocating several cores — it is billed by core per hour consumed — so in essence you only pay for what you consume. It is in fact opposite to OCPUs, where you pay based on a number of allocated cores (which may be idle) — with ECPUs you count by what you consume.
While provisioning a new Autonomous Database:
- The CPU count defaults to 2 ECPUs, whilst the default for OCPU (used for non-Autonomous Databases) is 1.
- For Autonomous Databases that need 2 or more ECPUs, you must specify the number of assigned ECPUs as an even integer.
The pricing is based on ECPUs consumed per second, rounded up to full hours at fixed hourly rates depending on the program/service. Customers can avail of ECPUs with ‘bring their own licensing’ (BYOL) as well.
Oracle have recently introduced the ECPU pricing model for their cloud-based Autonomous Database products. Oracle state that this is to avoid ‘ … the possibility of complex pricing models in the future..’, and I must agree — it will reduce complexity for pricing in the Oracle Cloud, but only if Oracle provide ECPU as the single billing metric and not have the OCPU metric available at the same time. Otherwise, a customer could have multiple metrics to manage and apply billing metrics to, which could lead to mixed messages with monitoring license consumption; which in turn could develop high value risks.
It is possible that Oracle will over time introduce more offerings in their cloud service with the ECPU metric but what does that mean to you, the customer? From Oracle’s documentation it states that OCPU (the traditional billing metric in Oracle Cloud) will be available for at least one year for Autonomous Databases. So, by 2024, customers of Autonomous Database may have to change their metric: the default metric will be ECPUs. Oracle themselves advise that you can ‘convert’ OCPUs to ECPUs in 2023, but the mechanism for this has yet to be determined — I am sure there will be a conversion process and hope this will be published soon.
There is a slight difference between OCPUs and ECPUs in that ECPUs are service specific. For instance, Autonomous Datawarehouse may require more computing power than Autonomous Transactional Processing, therefore you can, at a service level, see by an hourly rate how much each service is costing elastically, rather than paying for OCPUs that may never be fully utilised.
What I mean by ‘elastically’ is … think of an elastic band — it can be stretched to be utilised for a bigger demand, but also go back to its original form — when licensing products based on elastic cloud services, you count what you consume or stretch to. Customers with the OCPU billing metric should count the number of cores provisioned to determine how many licenses are needed, even though they may never really consume all of them. On the other hand, with ECPUs you only pay for what you consume. At Version 1 we see many customers acquiring Universal Credits based on an estimated set number of OCPUs, when in fact the consumption is much lower– therefore not rightsized license-wise.
At provision time, for example when adding a new Autonomous Database, you can choose ECPUs or OCPUs as the billing metric, all core features such as auto-scaling, autonomous data guard, cloning etc are available to both metrics, however Oracle state that in future some ‘new’ Autonomous features would be available only on ECPUs. For example, Oracle has lowered the price of storage for Autonomous Data Warehouses on Shared Infrastructure from $118.40 to $25.00 per Terabyte per month.
Summary
In summary, there is no real difference (for now) when using OCPUs or ECPUs in terms of service, but there could be differences in better-price performance with ECPUs over OCPUs. Of course, we will not figure this out until customers start to select ECPUs and do proper comparisons over time. But the fact that Oracle state that some ‘new’ features would only be on ECPUs means that eventually Oracle will start to advise customers to convert, and that Oracle will eventually phase out OCPUs in favour or ECPUs as the default billing metric.
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