Thursday, July 19, 2018

Oracle VBCS - Pay As You Go Cloud Model Experience Explained

If you are considering starting using VBCS cloud service from Oracle, may be this post will be useful. I will share my experience with pay as you go model.

Two payment models are available:

1. Pay As You Go - good when accessing VBCS time to time. Can be terminated at any time
2. Monthly Flex - good when need to run VBCS 24/7. Requires commitment, can't be terminated at any time

When you create Oracle Cloud account, initially you will get 30 days free trial period. At the end of that period (or earlier), you can upgrade to billable plan. To upgrade, go to account management and choose to upgrade promotional offer - you will be given choice to go with Pay As You Go or Monthly Flex:


As soon as you upgrade to Pay As You Go, you will start seeing monthly usage amount in the dashboard. Also it shows hourly usage of VBCS instance, for the one you will be billed:


Click on monthly usage amount, you will see detail view per each service billing. When VBCS instance is stopped (in case of Pay As You Go) - you will be billed only for hardware storage (Compute Classic) - this is relatively very small amount:


There are two options, how you can create VBCS instance - either autonomous VBCS or customer managed VBCS. To be able to stop/start VBCS instance and avoid billing when instance is not used (in case of Pay As You Go) - make sure to go with customer managed VBCS. In this example, VBCS instance was used only for 1 hour and then it was stopped, it can be started again at anytime:


To manage VBCS instance, you would need to navigate to Oracle Cloud Stack UI. From here you can start stop both DB and VBCS in single action. It is not enough to stop VBCS, make sure to stop DB too, if you are not using it:

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