In early September, an exciting development was announced on azure.microsoft.com: Oracle Autonomous Database is now available on Azure as a Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) offering. This marks a significant shift from the previous approach, where customers were required to engage with Oracle’s sales team to secure a private offering for Oracle Autonomous Database on Azure. The introduction of the PAYG model means that businesses can now directly access Oracle Autonomous Database as a native Azure resource without the need for extensive sales negotiations or long-term commitments. This streamlined process significantly reduces barriers to entry, making it easier than ever for organizations to leverage the power of Oracle’s Autonomous Database in the Azure cloud ecosystem.
While the traditional private offer process is still available for those who prefer it, the flexibility of the PAYG model opens up new possibilities for agile enterprises looking to scale their data management capabilities on demand. For more details on getting started with Oracle Autonomous Database on Azure, you can visit the official Oracle documentation.
For those who want to have more Multicloud and to go with Oracle Autonomous Database in Google Cloud aka GCP, I strongly recommend this blog post from my Accenture colleague and Oracle ACE Simo Vilmunen: https://www.thatfinnishguy.blog/2024/10/03/can-you-believe-it-provisioning-autonomous-database-on-gcp/
The Oracle Database@Azure Offering
From the documentation:
Private offer: With this option, you first contact Oracle’s sales team to negotiate a contract for Oracle Database@Azure. To use Oracle Exadata Database Service, you must purchase Oracle Database@Azure using a private offer. You can also provision Oracle Autonomous Database after purchasing a private offer.
Pay As You Go offer: You can purchase this offer in the Azure Marketplace without contacting Oracle Sales. Oracle offers Autonomous Database for customers purchasing the Pay As You Go offer. Pay as You Go offers the most flexibility, letting you start and stop using the service at any time.
Let’s take a look at this new offering. I will show you how easy it is, to ramp up an Oracle Autonomous Database at Azure with a simple setup.
Why the Azure subscription matters
In my company, I got the chance to get a Visual Studio Enterprise Subscription. This subscription contains 140 Swiss Francs every month for resource usage. But, this subscription does not cover the Oracle offering or other resources from the Azure Marketplace. If you try to subscribe to the Oracle offering, then it fails. Thanks to Azure support who has figured it out. There are two possibilities to get the offering with this subscription: Temporarily remove the spending limit on the subscription or create a Pay-As-You-Go Subscription. I decided for the first version, removed the limit for a month and was able to subscribe successfully. Click on the images for larger resolution.
The Subscription Process – step-by-step
Oracle Database@Azure | Overview: Create Subscription
Select Pay-As-You-Go Model
Select the subscription and the plan.
Review the settings, insert phone number and create the subscription.
After a couple of minutes – the deployment is completed.
And again some minutes later, you get an email, onboarding in progress.
Time to create a new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure account for testing purposes.
The confirmation email when your account is created and the Oracle Database@Azure service is activated from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure side.
Back in the Azure OracleSubscription resource, the purchase status is Subscribed and the Oracle Cloud Account status is set to Activated.
Now we are ready to provision the first Oracle Autonomous Database@Azure in Pay-As-You-Go model.
After couple of minutes, your Azure account is linked with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and you are ready to order your first Oracle Autonomus Database@Azure and pay what you use. Read in my next blog post, how an Oracle Autonomous Database@Azure is provisioned and what happens in the background.