Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Oracle Database on Amazon Cloud - Now Available


Amazon has kept its promise of making Oracle 11g available on per hour billing. Finally, after its announcement in Feb 2011, Oracle 11g database is now available on Amazon RDS. Which means you can use Oracle database on cloud with the same per hour billing rates (pay-as-you-go model) you pay for other resources.
Amazon RDS brings Oracle Standard One, Standard and Enterprise editions on RDS. It’s now the 2nd database to be available on RDS; MySQL was available for quite some time now. As I had mentioned in my earlier post, Oracle will be available under 2 difference licensing scheme –
BYOL (Bring Your Own License) – Basically allows you to bring and reuse your existing licenses. Start from $0.11 per hour, this is mainly for the underlying hardware.
License Included – No upfront investment/commitment.  Start from $0.16 per hour, this includes underlying hardware and oracle database license cost.
Important to note that only “Standard Edition One” is available under “License included” model which means if you need Enterprise features then you need to go via BYOL which has upfront cost.
Options you see on launching a database on Amazon RDS -

In terms of features, you need not worry about general DBA tasks, backup, patching, monitoring (using CloudWatch) etc. All these tasks will be Amazon’s responsibility. As per the Amazon site, parameter control is available via DB Parameter but on my first glance couldn’t find any editable parameters (maybe I’m missing something). Replication (similar to what’s available with MySQL) is not yet ready. What I liked is that there is no additional charge for backup storage up to 100% of your provisioned database storage for an active DB Instance. You have to pay for it as soon as you terminate the database instance. 
Currently only one version, Oracle 11.2.0.2, is available. It remains to be seen on the choice of version that will be made available in future.
Refer to Amazon RDS site for more details around cost and features.

4 comments:

sonu said...

Hi,

Thanks for updating us.

I want to know about ORACLE RAC 10g/11g availability on Cloud. Can you please update me?

Thanks,
Suchi

My Thoughts said...

Hi,

Thanks for visiting the site and reading through the blog post.

Regarding, Oracle RAC availability on Cloud - it's not yet available (specifically on Amazon cloud); not even with this new RDS launch.

With RDS, you can get "auto host replacement" in case of a hardware failure but thats not RAC.

There are a few limitations with AWS EC2 instances such as getting EBS volume sharable across instances etc. which makes RAC setup not a possiblility at this moment.

Hope this answer your query. Let me know, if not.

Thanks
Siba

Anonymous said...

Does Amazon have an ETA on when they might support 11g RAC? Thanks.

My Thoughts said...

There is no ETA on RAC availability at the moment. If you look at the FAQ on their site it simply says "not supported currently" - http://aws.amazon.com/rds/faqs/#125