Amazon AWS Supports Oracle

Step right up and place your bets. Amazon‘s plans to support Oracle Database 11g on AWS is the latest in cloud computing news. I received an e-mail this morning (see below) announcing support:

Dear AWS Customer, We are excited to announce our plans to make Oracle Database 11g available via the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) during the second quarter of 2011. Amazon RDS is a web service that makes it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS for Oracle will include flexible pricing options. If you have existing Oracle licenses, you will be able to apply them to run Oracle Databases on Amazon RDS with no additional software licensing or support charges. If you don’t, you’ll be able to take advantage of on-demand hourly licensing with no upfront fees or long-term commitments. With Amazon RDS, you can provision and scale a relational database (and the underlying infrastructure hardware and software) in just minutes using the point-and-click interface of the AWS Management Console. Amazon RDS also manages time-consuming database administration tasks, including continuous backups, software patching, and exposing key operational metrics. Running Oracle Databases on Amazon RDS enables you to extend the ease of use and management capabilities of Amazon RDS to the Oracle Database Software. While this new Oracle Database offering is not yet available, we are announcing our plans in advance of launch to allow enterprises of all sizes that are interested in Oracle Database to plan for future database deployments. Click here to learn more, sign up to be notified when the service is available, and request contact from an AWS associate to answer your questions or schedule a briefing. In anticipation of this offering, you can click here to learn more about the benefits of Amazon RDS and deploy a managed MySQL database today. Since the user experience of Amazon RDS will be similar across MySQL and Oracle offerings, this is a great way to get started with Amazon RDS in preparation for the forthcoming Oracle Database offering. Sincerely, The Amazon RDS Team

This announcement raised a few questions:

1. Oracle’s support on VMware environments is unclear. VMware is the most widely used hypervisor in the enterprise, but Oracle will not officially support the platform. But when you ask end-users, they are running Oracle on VMware and getting support. Now they support AWS.
2. Who is going to consume Oracle Database 11g on AWS, why, and for what workloads? Test and development appear to be the obvious fit, but I have to assume companies will be pretty conscious of the type of data they load. From a pure testing/QA process, I see some advantages but still believe it would all be test data.
3. Does Oracle have any programs in place to onboard Database 11g from AWS into the enterprise data center running in a highly virtualized environment? Will it stay in their stack or will their go to market strategy ever include VMware?
4. Can Citrix Xenserver take advantage of this? If so, how? We already know Citrix and AWS have collaborative solutions, but can Citrix reel in the Oracle workload? If they can, this could have a giant impact on the presence of Citrix XenServer inside the data center.

I’m not easily convinced that enterprise IT is going to start running Oracle Database 11g on AWS, but I am convinced that Oracle developers and application teams will look for ways to leverage this service to help accelerate application lifecycle times, test new code, and streamline the development process.