The lifecycle of public cloud adoption for mission critical workloads continues to progress. More of our clients every year embrace public cloud as a viable alternative for their mission critical workloads. The appeal is genuine; world-class data centers, high levels of security and uptime, point and click provisioning, built-in disaster recovery, etc.

That is not to say that the move to public cloud is without complexity. Some complications are technical, but most are organizational. One particularly sticky problem is trying to figure out how the move to public cloud will affect third party licensing. And of course, our favorite software vendor, Oracle is at the forefront of this topic.

As with the move to virtualization over a decade ago, Oracle is spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) related to the topic of running Oracle core technologies in AWS. The usual line is that you will need twice as much Oracle licensing in AWS as you do when running on-premises. Taken at face value, this would seem a deal breaker.

The AWS Optimized License Assessment (OLA) is an Amazon funded engagement designed to help customers make the best decisions about the disposition of their Oracle environments.