Coming Soon – Oracle Database 11g on Amazon Relational Database Service

As part of our continued effort to make AWS even more powerful and flexible, we are planning to support Oracle Database 11g Release 2 via the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) beginning in the second quarter of 2011.

Amazon RDS makes it easy for you to create, manage, and scale a relational database without having to worry about capital costs, hardware, operating systems, backup tapes, or patch levels. Thousands of developers are already using multiple versions of MySQL via RDS. The RDS tab of the AWS Management Console, the Command-Line tools, and the RDS APIs will all support the use of the Oracle Database as the “Database Engine” parameter.

As with today’s MySQL offering, Amazon RDS running Oracle Database will reduce administrative overhead and expense by maintaining database software, taking continuous backups for point-in-time recovering, and exposing key operational metrics via Amazon CloudWatch. It will also allow scaling of compute and storage capacity to be done with a few clicks of the AWS Management Console. Concepts applicable to MySQL on RDS, including backup windows, DB Parameter Groups, and DB Security Groups will also apply to Oracle Database on RDS.

You will be able to pay for your use of Oracle Database 11g in several different ways:

If you don’t have any licenses, you’ll be able to pay for your use of Oracle Database 11g on an hourly basis without any up-front fees or mandatory long-term commitments. The hourly rate will depend on the Oracle Database edition and the DB Instance size. You will also be able to reduce your hourly rate by purchasing Reserved DB Instances.

If you have existing Oracle Database licenses you can bring them to the cloud and use them pursuant to Oracle licensing policies without paying any additional software license or support fees.

I think that this new offering and the flexible pricing models will be of interest to enterprises of all shapes and sizes, and I can’t wait to see how it will be put to use.

If you would like to learn more about our plans by visiting our new Oracle Database on Amazon RDS page. You’ll be able to sign up to be notified when this new offering is available and you’ll also be able to request a briefing from an AWS associate.

In anticipation of this offering, you can visit the Amazon RDS page to learn more about the benefits of Amazon RDS and see how you can deploy a managed MySQL database today in minutes. Since the user experience of Amazon RDS will be similar across the MySQL and Oracle offerings, this is a great way to get started with Amazon RDS in ahead of the forthcoming Oracle Database offering.

— Jeff;