Posted May 24, 2011

Amazon Puts Oracle's Database in the Cloud

By Paul Shread

Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) has unveiled a new cloud service based on Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) database technology.

The Amazon Web Services Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle Database manages common database administration tasks, including provisioning, backups, software patching, monitoring and hardware scaling.

Customers can use the managed database service to run Oracle Database 11g Release 2 under two different licensing models, License Included and Bring-Your-Own-License (BYOL).

In the License Included service model, customers do not need separately purchased Oracle licenses; the Oracle Database software has been licensed by AWS. License Included pricing starts at $0.16 per hour, including software, the underlying hardware resources, and Amazon RDS management capabilities.

Under the BYOL model, customers who already own Oracle Database licenses can run Oracle deployments on Amazon RDS with rates starting at $0.11 per hour. The BYOL model is for customers who prefer to use existing Oracle database licenses or purchase new licenses directly from Oracle.

In addition to hourly pricing with no upfront fees or long-term commitments, customers can also purchase Reserved Database Instances under one- or three-year reservation terms, for a one-time upfront payment for each Database Instance and a discounted hourly usage rate. Customers can also work with AWS solution providers and system integrators to deploy Oracle databases on RDS.

Oracle Database is the second supported database engine for Amazon RDS, which already supports managed MySQL deployments.

For more information on Amazon RDS for Oracle, visit http://aws.amazon.com/rds/oracle.