Oracle Web Services Option Added by Amazon

Businesses and developers will soon be able to run Oracle Databases with the pricing flexibility, ease of use, and scalability of Amazon RDS and the AWS Cloud, Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) LLC announced today.

The subsidiary of Amazon.com (News - Alert), Inc., said it intends to make Oracle Database 11g available via the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) during the second quarter of 2011, TMCnet reported.

Amazon RDS is a Web service designed to make it easier to set up, operate, and scale a relational data base in the cloud.

The company said customers with existing Oracle (News - Alert) licenses will be able to run Oracle Databases on Amazon RDS without being burdened with additional software licensing or support charges. For customers that don’t have existing Oracle licenses, on-demand hourly licensing will be available and they won’t be charged upfront fees or have to make a long-term commitment.

With support for the Oracle Database engine, Amazon RDS aims to streamline database administration for multiple editions of Oracle Database 11g Release 2, which should allow developers to spend more time on the differentiating parts of their applications rather than maintaining and scaling their database infrastructure.

Mark Townsend, vice president, Oracle Database Server Technologies addressing Amazon’s stature in the cloud computing space, said, “Amazon continues to be a pioneer in cloud computing,” he said, “and we’ve worked closely together to make sure that the power of the Oracle portfolio is available to customers who want to run them in the AWS cloud. With more and more Oracle Database users interested in running on AWS, we are working with AWS to make sure the ease of fulfillment and platform agility of Amazon RDS is available for the Oracle Database.”

Plans are in the works for AWS to offer a variety of licensing options for running the Oracle Database on Amazon RDS. Among these licences are “Bring Your Own License” – (BYOL); On-Demand Database Instances (DB Instances); – a pay-by-the-hour licensing option; Reserved DB Instances –requiring a one-time payment for each DB Instance.

Technical support for Oracle Database will be available from Oracle for BYOL DB Instances, and from AWS with backline support from Oracle for On-Demand and Reserved DB Instances.

The exact date and pricing of the new offering was not announced, however, providing some background information, Raju Gulabani, vice president of Database Services at Amazon Web Services, explained that customers were pleased when Amazon launched Amazon RDS for MySQL and said enterprises asked when they would offer the same functionality for Oracle Databases. “We're pleased to share that we're not only releasing it soon, but also that we're ready to have conversations with interested customers so they can plan for future deployments," he said.

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