Amazon will offer Oracle Database 11g on RDS which brings patching, backup, replication, and failover support to Oracle’s database.
Oracle has provided for some time a good number of specific Amazon Machine Images (AMI), most of them being based on Linux and Database 11g, but Amazon intends to offer Oracle Database 11g as part of their Relational Database Service (RDS). That means that Amazon will take some of the administration burden off user’s shoulders such as updating the database with patches when available, backing it up and storing backups, scaling out via API calls, creating a replica in a different availability zone and keep it running to failover in case it is needed, creating read replicas in different zones for heavy-read workloads.
Amazon plans to offer three types of licensing:
- Bring Your Own License (BYOL) – run Oracle Database 11g on RDS using the license the customer already has. There are no additional software or support charges, but the customer will pay for CPU, storage, network traffic, etc., as it is with running any other software on EC2.
- On-demand DB Instances – it is a pay-by-hour license, without any other upfront fee.
- Reserved DB Instances – pay a fee upfront for the license and paying less per hour later
Amazon has not said yet how much pay-by-hour means, but the fees for using MySQL on RDS could represent a reference, expecting higher prices for Oracle DB 11g. A MySQL DB Instance running on demand in US North Virginia costs between $0.11 and $2.60 per hour, depending on the size of the instance, while the storage costs $0.10/GB/month, and the IO costs $0.10 per 1M requests. There are additional costs for transferring data in/out of RDS.
Oracle will provide support for BYOL customers, while Amazon will provide support for On-demand and Reserved Instances, getting help from Oracle when needed. Amazon plans to deliver the service during Q2 of 2011.