Blog Archives

On Tuesday, Amazon announced availability of an Oracle version of their Relational Database Service (RDS). RDS is one of Amazon’s cloud services. You can think of it as ”database as a service.” Amazon provides a running database, storage, horsepower and a variety management tasks. And all you have to do is store you data in it. RDS has been available with a MySQL engine for some time, but the Oracle version of this service has been long anticipated. Read the full article…

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is a robust, inexpensive and highly-available internet data storage service.  At Blue Gecko, we occasionally help our customers design and implement S3-based backup strategies.

Compared to conventional off site tape vaulting services, the advantages of vaulting database and other backups to S3 are many.  S3 backups are always on line, so you never have to wait for a  truck to arrive with your tapes. S3 backups are replicated, so if one of Amazon’s availability zones experiences a failure, your data is still intact and available at one of their other zones. Best of all, Amazon also offers the Elastic Compute Cloud (AKA EC2, virtual server hosts by the hour), so your S3 backups double as a super-low-cost disaster recovery strategy. S3 is low-cost, starting at just 3.7¢ / GB / month for storage, and 10¢ / GB for uploads. Read the full article…

Amazon EC2′s high-profile outage in the US East region has taught us a number of lessons.  For many, the take-away has been a realization that cloud-based systems (like conventionally-hosted systems) can fail.  Of course, we knew that, Amazon knew that, and serious companies who performed serious availability engineering before deploying to the cloud knew that. In cloud environments, as in conventionally-hosted environments, you must implement high-availability if you want high availability.  You can’t just expect it to magically be highly-available because it is “in the cloud.” Thorough and thoughtful high-availability engineering made it possible for EC2-based Netflix to experience no service interruptions through this event. Read the full article…

Openworld 2010, despite the supposedly lagging economy, had record attendance again this year.  No doubt this was the result of Oracle acquiring something like fourteen companies since last year, including Sun in 2009.  The crowds were thick, divided about evenly between geeks in badly-fitting vendor t-shirts and slick sales-side hustlers with dress pants and shiny shoes.  Read the full article…

Oracle OpenWorld 2010 is just bursting with big cloud-related announcements this week.  As I prepare to present on the Amazon cloud at OOW2010 on Thursday (http://bit.ly/aSKdIQ), I thought I would highlight two of the biggest cloud-related announcements of the week. Read the full article…

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…