Amazon Web Services

On Tuesday, Amazon announced availability of an Oracle version of their Relational Database Service (RDS). RDS is one of Amazon’s cloud services. You can think of it as ”database as a service.” Amazon provides a running database, storage, horsepower and a variety management tasks. And all you have to do is store you data in it. RDS has been available with a MySQL engine for some time, but the Oracle version of this service has been long anticipated.

As with Amazon’s other cloud services, you control and manage RDS services using a web application API.  You can either write your own software to do this, or use Amazon’s command line API tools or Amazon’s web-based console.

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is a robust, inexpensive and highly-available internet data storage service.  At Blue Gecko, we occasionally help our customers design and implement S3-based backup strategies.

Amazon EC2′s high-profile outage in the US East region has taught us a number of lessons.  For many, the take-away has been a realization that cloud-based systems (like conventionally-hosted systems) can fail.  Of course, we knew that, Amazon knew that, and serious companies who performed serious availability engineering before deploying to the cloud knew that. In cloud environments, as in conventionally-hosted environments, you must implement high-availability if you want high availability.  You can’t just expect it to magically be highly-available because it is “in the cloud.” Thorough and thoughtful high-availability engineering made it possible for EC2-based Netflix to experience no service interruptions through this event.

Openworld 2010, despite the supposedly lagging economy, had record attendance again this year.  No doubt this was the result of Oracle acquiring something like fourteen companies since last year, including Sun in 2009.  The crowds were thick, divided about evenly between geeks in badly-fitting vendor t-shirts and slick sales-side hustlers with dress pants and shiny shoes.  I landed somewhere in the middle of the two (badly-fitting dress shirt, comfortable jeans and loafers), proudly sporting a long dangling codpiece of ribbons from my attendee badge:

My OOW2010 Codpiece

Oracle OpenWorld 2010 is just bursting with big cloud-related announcements this week.  As I prepare to present on the Amazon cloud at OOW2010 on Thursday (http://bit.ly/aSKdIQ), I thought I would highlight two of the biggest cloud-related announcements of the week.

Exalogic

We all know about Exadata, Oracle’s hardware-based storage-optimized RAC monster capable of over 1 million IOPS.  In his keynote, Larry Ellison announced Exalogic, an appliance that is meant to provide cloud-like private internal infrastructure.  Oriented towards  middleware, Exalogic’s marketing materials emphasize the elasticity of resources and promote middleware consolidation onto a small set of Exalogic nodes.