Amazon Web Services on Tuesday launched Amazon Relational Database
Service (RDS) for Oracle Database. The service brings
pay-by-the-hour access to Oracle's database at fees ranging from
USD 0.11 to USD 3.40 per hour, including processing capacity and
management capabilities.
Originally announced in late January, RDS for Oracle makes 11g
Release 2 available in two different licensing models. In the
Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL) approach, customers who already own
Oracle database Standard Edition One, Standard Edition, or
Enterprise Edition can use their own database licenses. In the
License-included approach, customers use licenses purchased from
Oracle by Amazon Web Services, though this service is limited to
Oracle Standard Edition One, a limited version of the database that
lacks enterprise-class features including Real Applications
Clusters (RAC) and advanced compression.
In either licensing approach, RDS for Oracle management
capabilities include common database administration tasks such as
provisioning, backups, automated snapshots, software patching,
monitoring and metrics, and hardware scaling.
RDS for Oracle is offered in five database instance classes,
ranging from small (with 1.7 GB of memory and 1 virtual core) up to
high-memory quadruple-extra-large (with 68 GB of memory, 8 virtual
cores, and high I/O capacity). In the license-included approach, a
small instance is USD 0.16 per hour while the largest instance
class is USD 3.40 per hour. In the BYOL approach, small instances
are USD 0.11 and the largest USD 2.60 per hour.
Customers can tap into RDS for Oracle through Amazon Web Services
or through an Amazon partner. For example, marketing agency
Razorfish and integrator Capgemini both plan to help customers move
database-resident applications onto Amazon's cloud. "The ability to
leverage an existing investment in Oracle licenses makes
transitioning workloads into the cloud convenient and economical,"
stated Mandhir Gidda, U.K. technical director at Razorfish.
Oracle database developers are most likely to latch onto the
service, as it will let them spin up and spin down instances as
needed and scaled to the required capacity. Vendor software demos
and pilot projects are also likely deployment scenarios for RDS for
Oracle.
Upfront fees and long-term commitments are not required to use
on-demand database services, but Amazon said discounts of as much
as 48% are available by purchasing Reserved Database Instances with
one-time, upfront payments for one-year or three-year terms.
Reserved-instance fees range from USD 227.50 for a one-year, BYOL
deal on a small instance (with discounted usage fees of USD 0.046
per hour) up to USD 12,600 for a license-included, reserved
instance of the quadruple-extra-large, high-memory class database
in a one-year deal (with discounted fees of USD 1.28 per hour).
Extra fees apply for associated storage and I/O, regardless of the
licensing approach. Storage fees are USD 0.10 per GB, per month.
Data transfer fees are USD 0.10 per GB, per month into the database
and USD 0.15 to USD 0.08 per GB, per month out of the database
depending on overall volumes.
Amazon RDS already supports managed MySQL deployments, so Oracle is
the second database engine supported by RDS.
Amazon's Oracle service is likely to compared to Microsoft SQL
Azure, a services that charges up-front fees of USD 9.99 for a 1-GB
database, per month, up to USD 500 for a 50-GB database, per month,
with no separate hourly fees (though data-transfer fees do
apply).
Pricing seems simpler for SQL Azure, though for USD 9.99 you could
run a license-included, 1.7-GB instance of Oracle for 62 hours.