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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;

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;

The GigaSpaces XAP (eXtreme Application Platform) is now available as an Amazon EC2 AMI (Amazon Machine Image).

At the core, XAP implements a scalable, in-memory database which can be
used as a data grid, a messaging grid, or as a parallel processing
framework.

XAP makes it easy to scale the entire middleware layer (data, messaging, and services) of an application. It does this using an architecture which provides for just-in-time provisioning of processing resources, making it an ideal match for EC2.  You can build and test an application on your laptop, and then migrate it to your own data center or to Amazon EC2 without any code changes.

The entire system runs under the control of an SLA-driven container. The container hosts applications, scales out to additional instances as needed, and manages partitioning, replication, and failover.

Applications can be built using C++, any .Net language, or Java via Spring, Hibernate, Tomcat, Mule, or J2EE. These applications can easily store plain (native) objects into the core storage facility provided by GigaSpaces.

It is easy to launch a GigaSpaces cluster on Amazon EC2 by following the directions in the tutorial. The platform is available on a per-hour basis, charged through Amazon DevPay, per their pricing schedule. You can also see the whole EC2 launch and management process in action in the screencast.

GigaSpaces will be presenting a pair of screencasts next month. On July 1st, they will talk about The GigaSpaces-RightScale One-Click-Cluster. On July 22nd they will talk about Scaling Applications on Amazon EC2 (I’ll be participating in that one).

– Jeff;

After a great deal of work, I am pleased to introduce a sneak peek at the new StayPress system.

StayPress is a collection of plugins that will turn a standard vanilla installation of WordPress or WordPress MU into a property management and bookings system. Of course when I say Property, I actually mean any bookable resource of which there is a finite availability. So the StayPress system will be able to manage property rentals, hotel room rentals, conference rooms and centres, B and B’s, training rooms, bands, etc…

The new StayPress system takes over from the previous clearskys.net collection of plugins and brings everything together into a more manageable and co-ordinated group.

Whilst there will obviously be a downloadable version of the StayPress plugins, we are also planning a hosted version of the system for those who do not want the trouble of running their own website.

If you would like to be kept informed of updates and our release dates then please subscribe to either this sites RSS Feed or visit StayPress.com and subscribe to the StayPress only blog.

StayPress is in no way affiliated with Automattic or WordPress, other than being built on one of the best web CMS systems around.