Pay by the hour or bring your own? - May 24, 2011 at 12:45 pm

 

 

 

Today Amazon made a big announcement, the availability of Oracle as an option for their Relational Database Service (RDS). For those who are unfamiliar with RDS, it is a balance between a pure play multi-tenant Cloud database (think SimpleDB, Database.com) and running your own RDMS (MySQL, Oracle) on a virtual server in a cloud. RDS launched as a managed MySQL offering and AWS takes care of all the heavy lifting (patches, backups, etc) and makes it very easy to switch sizes and increase the horsepower if need be.

 

However many Enterprises still like the reliability and stability of an Oracle database, and now AWS is offering an Oracle option for their wildly popular RDS service. This will immediately open up doors to make AWS an easy option for Enterprise dev and test environments and make it easier to do production applications in AWS that are backed by Oracle.

 

The offering comes in two versions:

 

·      License Included - This version includes a license for an Oracle Database Standard Edition One database included and starts at $0.16/hr. The hourly charge is for the Oracle license and all hardware and virtual server costs.

·      BYOL – Bring Your Own License – This allows customers to bring their own Oracle licenses to AWS and run Standard or Enterprise Edition databases starting at $0.11/hr.

 

I predict this will be very popular and will give companies another reason to move systems to the cloud, or do dev/test or quick projects on Oracle instead of an open source database.