Using Amazon RDS for Oracle as the Oracle SOA Suite Database

This post is written by Fabio Douek, an architect at AWS Partner Rubicon Red.

When we started to provision Oracle Fusion Middleware platforms with AWS, we took advantage of the ability to create AWS infrastructure within minutes. We can also use MyST to provision complex platforms that are EDG-compliant with Oracle Fusion Middleware in less than an hour.

One challenge that we faced was that we couldn’t use Amazon RDS for Oracle as the database for our Oracle Fusion Middleware installations. Our inability to do so was primarily because the RDS master user didn’t have the database privileges required to run the Oracle Repository Creation Utility (RCU). As a result, we implemented our own automation for provisioning the Oracle Database running on Amazon EC2 instances.

Although this approach works for running development and test workloads on AWS, when it comes to implementing production workloads, Amazon RDS for Oracle provides a number of additional benefits. These benefits include simplified administration tasks, including backups, software patching, monitoring, and hardware scaling.

In addition, Multi-AZ deployment with Amazon RDS for Oracle simplifies the implementation of a highly available architecture, because it contains built-in support for automated failover from your primary database to a synchronously replicated secondary database in an alternative Availability Zone in case of a failure.

Our approach to this challenge started to change late last year, with a number of our customers looking at running Oracle SOA workloads in production on AWS. Being an AWS Technology Partner, we provided this feedback to AWS, who in return invited us to collaborate with the RDS team.

We spent the last four months working with the Amazon RDS team to test the RCU capability within MyST. This process went extremely well, and the Amazon RDS team worked closely with us to support the go-live of our first customer on Oracle SOA 12.2.1 on AWS using Amazon RDS for Oracle —what we believe to be a world first!

The following diagram illustrates the type of architecture required.

More recently, Amazon has now announced that RCU is officially supported by RDS Oracle. That’s great news, because it means that we can provision an Oracle Fusion Middleware environment that is EDG-compliant and highly available within minutes. This way, we can take advantage of RDS to simplify ongoing operations.

To find out more detail on the steps required to enable Oracle SOA with RDS Oracle, see our blog post on the Rubicon Red website.