Blog Archives

Earlier this year, Blue Gecko designed and implemented an Oracle EC2 solution for Sage Manufacturing, an Oracle E-Business Suite customer.  Download the white paper here, and read how Blue Gecko leveraged the flexible, cost-effective Amazon EC2 platform to improve Sage’s Oracle E-Business Suite infrastructure.

Related Links:

Oracle processor licensing on Amazon EC2

Oracle E-Business Suite in the Amazon Cloud

What is Amazon Web Services?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows you to add and remove computing services on demand.  You pay for only what you use.  There are no contracts and no fees other than usage charges.  It works exactly like an electricity bill.  When you need more servers, you add them.  When you need more storage, you add it.  When you don’t need these things anymore, you simply remove them. Read the full article…

Here’s a great article on database security in the cloud published in eWeek by Slavik Markovich, founder of Sentrigo.

The truth is, Slavik’s article has great advice for anyone considering hosting their application with any third-party provider.  When you don’t own the infrastructure, you lose some control no matter how the service is marketed.  Read the full article…

The next Seattle Amazon Web Services User Group meeting is Tuesday, April 27.  For more details, go to http://www.sawsug.com/.

Without completely copying everything our Oracle on EC2 Licensing page, I wanted to provide a quick overview of Oracle Processor licensing for EC2.

Oracle can be licensed on Amazon EC2, but we have to translate processor use to core use to determine licensing costs.  Where bare-metal processor licensing uses a CPU socket to define a processor, EC2 instances use cores.  Oracle has provided a metric of 4 cores = 1 socket, rounded up to the nearest 4 cores.  So, a small instance with 1 core would require 1 socket (1 core rounded up to 4), or one processor license.   An extra large instance with 4 cores would also require 1 socket – same as a small instance. Read the full article…

I created the Bluegecko MySQL training AMI as a MySQL sandbox that folks could use to learn things about MySQL. I wanted the AMI to have MySQL 5.0, and a large collection of tools — for both tinkering and visualizing what is happening inside MySQL and on the system in general.

I chose to host the AMI on a small instance since they’re cheap to operate, which means you can fire up 3-4 of them to try out a replication scheme without feeling guilty. It runs CentOS 5.4 and MySQL 5.0.77 from the CentOS repository. Read the full article…

At Collaborate this week, I received a lot of questions regarding support and certification for Oracle on Amazon Web Services.  After unraveling a few of these questions, I realized that the difference between “certification” and “support” has become quite confused.  I thought a quick explanation might help, because the difference is not really that subtle and definitely important. Read the full article…

Blue Gecko would like to invite you to a complimentary lunch seminar on Wednesday, May 5, 2010. Jeremiah Wilton will be covering the topic High Performance Oracle 11g in the Amazon Cloud. There are 15 spaces available so sign up soon to reserve your spot. Click here to submit your registration info. Read the full article…

I am scheduled to present “E-Business Suite in the Amazon Cloud” on Monday, April 19 at Collaborate 2010.  I’ll provide an overview of Amazon Web Services and present a few common use cases that E-Business Suite DBAs in particular might find useful.  If you are an E-Business Suite customer and do NOT have a DR site or struggle with sharing test environments, this presentation is for you.  You can download the white paper from our community page; the abstract is as follows:

With Oracle’s announcement of support for Amazon Web Services (AWS), it is now possible to run Oracle databases and Oracle E-Business Suite in the AWS EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) cloud. In this session we will create a working release 12 Vision Demo environment on EC2, based entirely on audience specifications. Through the deployment process, we will explain the basics of EC2, and show how anyone can instantly deploy Oracle E-Business Suite for less than $20/day. Demonstrate the basics of working with Amazon EC2 Demonstrate the advantages to running Oracle E-Business Suite on EC2 Explore Oracle/EC2 best practices

Amazon recently allowed Elastic Block Store to boot persistent images. However, there are two concerns I have with the method.

* The EBS boot volumes must be EBS Snapshots, which cost more than regular EBS volumes. (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#pricing)
* The EBS boot volumes currently do not work within the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) infrastructure. (http://aws.amazon.com/vpc/faqs/#45) Read the full article…