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We've been working with Oracle to bring a number of their products into the cloud. The first fruits of this work are now ready: cloud-compatible licensing, EC2 AMIs preloaded with a variety of Oracle products, support programs, backup to the cloud, and a cloud management portal.

As more and more enterprises take a look at the Amazon Web Services, they invariably ask about packaged software, particularly databases. With this announcement, AWS users now gain access to a commercial-grade, brand-name database, along with the necessary tools and middleware needed to build and host heavy duty enterprise applications in the Amazon cloud.

So, what's available?

The Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle Enterprise Manager can now be licensed to run in the cloud on Amazon EC2. Customers can even use their existing software licenses with no additional license fees. Read more about cloud licensing here.

I should say a few words about licensing here because this question comes up all the time. The variability and flexibility of cloud-based licensing has perplexed users and vendors for some time now. Now that a large software vendor has made a clear statement of direction here, we should see more and more cloud-compatible licenses before too long.

These products, along with Oracle Enterprise Linux, are available in prepackaged, ready to run form, encapsulated within a set of free Amazon EC2 AMIs. Using these AMIs, new instances can be launched and ready within minutes. Of course, Oracle's development tools -- Oracle Application Express, Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, and Oracle Workshop for WebLogic -- can all be used to build applications for this new environment.

What does this mean? Instead of budgeting for and acquiring hardware, setting it up, installing an operating system and several layers of complex packages, you can simply launch one of these AMIs on EC2 and be up and  running in minutes. This is definitely no-fuss, no-muss application development and deployment.

But wait, there's more...

Oracle Enterprise Linux on EC2 is fully supported by Oracle Unbreakable Support and Amazon Premium Support. Once again, another potential adoption barrier has been lowered. If you've got a problem, Oracle and Amazon are ready to help out.

There's also a secure backup solution for database servers running on EC2 or within the corporate network. The new Oracle Secure Backup Cloud Module allows customers to use Amazon S3 as a backup destination with virtually unlimited capacity, obviating the need to deal with local backup devices. The module encrypts backups and makes use of multiple connections to S3 to maximize throughput.

Need I even talk about how painful and expensive backup used to be? Buying expensive devices and media, keeping the media safe and secure offsite (yet still available if needed for a recovery), dealing with physical space issues, and 100 other things. Now, simply send your bits to Amazon S3 and forget about dealing with all of these other issues.

And if that's not enough, Oracle has also unveiled a new Cloud Management Portal. This is a free, web-based way to manage Oracle software running in the cloud.

These products will be on display at Oracle OpenWorld, which is taking place this week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. If you are at the conference, please stop by the AWS booth to say hello and to learn more.

I'll be speaking at the Storage Developer Conference in Santa Clara tomorrow (September 23) and will talk about this offering as well. Once again, say hello.

Here are some very useful white papers and other resources:

1. Oracle's Cloud Computing Center, chock full of links, demos, and information.
2. A data sheet, Oracle In The Cloud.
3. A white paper, Oracle Data Backup in the Cloud.
4. Oracle's Cloud Computing FAQ.
5. Dynamic demo showing how to launch the Oracle Database on EC2.

-- Jeff;

It is time for one of my inbox-clearing blog posts once again. Here's a bunch of cool stuff that you might like:

• Benjamin Kudria just wrapped up an internship at the New York Times. He wrote a detailed recap of his experience and noted that he had the opportunity to use Amazon EC2 and S3. As he notes, "had never worked with AWS before, and I was amazed at how easy it was to have my managers agree to offload a pretty significant part of our functionality to Amazon’s servers. I ended up learned a lot about S3 and EC2!"
• rPath will be sponsoring a Cloud Computing Meetup in New York City next week at the Westin in Times Square. The meetup will take place after conclusion of the AWS Start-Up event at the same location.
• SubCloud is an enterprise file system implemented on top of Amazon S3 using FUSE. It has a rich feature list, lots of documentation, and is available for trial use via a time-limited license key. Files are stored directly into S3, which means that they can also be accessed using other S3 tools.
• There's a new release of Bucket Explorer, with support for copying, renaming, and moving files, local vs. remote file comparison, reporting, and much more. Version for Windows, Linux, and the Mac are available.
• Adam Kalsey of Workhabit wrote to tell me that they've used EC2 and EBS to create a fully managed, autoscaling Drupal hosting platform. You can read more in the blog post and you can learn even more about it here. The platform takes care of all of the dirty work. As they say:
  
  
  We took everything we know about scaling Drupal and built it into a turn-key cluster called Elastic2 that's pre-tuned to run Drupal. Simply place your Drupal app on the cluster and you'll be able to run and scale your site. We continually monitor your servers and traffic and automatically add capacity to the cluster as needed.
  You can also watch Adam discuss his new pride and joy.
• Next week, folks from BioTeam, Univa UD and AWS will jointly deliver a live webinar: "Cloud and Clusters: Running UniCluster in Amazon's EC2." The webinar is free but you'd better sign up ahead of time. They'll provide an overview of HPC (High Performance Computing) using EC2, who's doing it and how.
• My friend Adam Rifkin sent me a link to a really interesting blog post by Andy Baio. Andy used the Amazon Mechanical Turk to uncover release dates for a list of hundreds of sound clips used inside of a music mashup. He was very happy with the quality and speed of the work -- "Within an hour, all but 4 answers were submitted.  The median time to finish a request was an impressive 26 seconds." I've also tagged a couple of other good Mechanical Turk success stories on Delicous.
• Damien Tanner wrote to tell me that New Bamboo has released Panda, an open source solution for video uploading, encoding, and streaming. Running entirely within the AWS cloud, Panda makes use of EC2, S3, and SimpleDB. Panda is available as an EC2 AMI (Amazon Machine Image) for easy launching. There's also a complete getting started guide. Once running, Panda is accessed using a REST API.
• Since I just mentioned SimpleDB, I should also note that we have a job opening for a Business Development Manager for SimpleDB. Details are in the job description -- you'll need 5-7 years of relevant experience, a technical degree, and great communication skills. If you click the link and land on a different job, go here and search for "SimpleDB."

Ok, I think that about does it for tonight. If you've built something interesting using an Amazon Web Service, drop me a line and I'll do my best to mention it here.

-- Jeff;

As more and more developers look to put AWS to use in various ways, questions about security practices and policies come to our attention from time to time.

We've just published the first version of the AWS Security white paper. The paper provides answers to a number of questions about certifications, physical security, backups, and issues specific to particular services.

-- Jeff;

This is a companion post to my earlier post -- Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) - Bring Us Your Data. In the other post you can read about the features of EBS. This post goes into more detail on the tool and library support that has been built by our community of third-party developers.

Here are some tools:

• The RightScale Dashboard includes complete support for EBS. RightScale founder Thorsten von Eicken has written a pair of posts to accompany the release: Why
  Amazon's Elastic Block Store Matters and Amazon's Elastic Block Store
  Explained. They've also got some good background information and tutorials.
• Ylastic supports EBS; more info can be found on their features page, in their blog post, or in the screencast.
• Cloud Studio also supports EBS. You can see the features in action in the video.
• Our own JavaScript scratchpad has been updated. You can use the scratchpad to create and make calls to the EC2 API.

And some libraries (some of the third parties will finalize their support in a day or two):

• Perl - Net::Amazon::EC2, Amazon EC2 Perl Library.
• Java - Typica, Amazon EC2 Java Library.
• Python - Boto.
• C# - Amazon EC2 C# Library.
• VB.Net - Amazon EC2 VB.Net Library.
• PHP - Amazon EC2 PHP Library.

-- Jeff;

PS -  I'll be updating this post a couple of times in the wake of the EBS launch so come back again soon.

Earlier this year I talked about the unique and powerful AWS-powered solutions offered by Vertica and Sonian.

Tomorrow (August 21st), I will be taking part in a unique, three-party webinar. In the webinar you'll get to hear from me, from Vertica Field Engineering Director Omer Trajman, and from Sonian CTO Greg Arnette. The webinar will start at 8 AM PST.

In the webinar you will learn how cloud computing is changing the economics of data warehousing and large-scale analytic database applications. You'll hear how Sonian has built and launched a cloud-based digital content archiving system on top of Amazon EC2 and the Vertica Analytical Database for the Cloud.

The webinar is free but you do need to register ahead of time. Hope to see you there.

-- Jeff;