EC2

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.

I’ve just published Oracle Database 11g Express Edition Amazon EC2 image (AMI) but most of you have never used Amazon EC2… Not until now! This is a guide to walk you thorough the process of getting your very first EC2 instance up and running. Buckle up — it’s going to be awesome!

1. Go to Amazon Web Services and open an account. You could use one that you buy your books with.
2. Go to AWS Management Console for EC2 and sign up for Amazon EC2. You will need your credit card for this. You will not be charged anything unless you are either start using EC2 instances or allocate EBS storage and other related items. The sign-up page shows you all the pricing. You will especially like “Free tier for new AWS customers” section that gives you 750 hours of Micro instance uptime, 10 GB of EBS storage some bandwidth and few small goodies. This mean that you will not be charged anything in the beginning of your experiments. They will also do phone verification — I can’t remember I’ve seen it last time so it must be reasonable new. Works for cell phones too. Activation usually takes just few minutes and you’ll get an email confirmation and you get access to EC2, VPC, S3 and SNS. Direct link to AWS Management Console for EC2
3. Now you can launch your first instance. So let’s start Oracle 11g XE beta image that I published just recently. Click “Launch Instance” then select “Community AMIs” tab. It will start loading AMIs list and it will take ages so don’t wait for it to finish and search for “pythian” – you will get pythian-oel-5.6-64bit-Oracle11gXE-beta image with AMI ID ami-e231cc8b the latest at the time of this writing.
   
   Select that image.
4. On the next tab choose instance size. It’s enough to use Micro instance to start playing with Oracle 11g XE but be prepared that Micro instance doesn’t guarantee any CPU capacity so it might be “bursty” but, hey — it’s free or costs peanuts if you run out of free time. You could also choose an availability zone closer to you.
   
5. On the next screen leave everything by default. You could select what to do when you shutdown the instance from inside the instance. Stop will keep your instance and EBS storage allocated and you can start it and all your changes will persist. However, you will be charged for allocated EBS storage (if you go beyond free 10GB) but it’s very little. “Terminate” will actually release EBS storage if you shutdown your instance. Note that you can always stop and terminate instances from AWS Management Console. I usually leave option on “Stop” to avoid accidental data loss. You can skip defining any tags — this is optional metadata so you can orient better in your instances. I recommend you at least specify a descriptive name to make sure you clearly distinguish multiple running instances later.
6. If you didn’t have a Key Pair created in the past, you will do that at the next step. This is basically public / private key pair and you get to download private part — save it and keep it safe and don’t share this .pem file with anybody. Someone with access to it can gain root access to your images! You can always create more than one Key Pair by the way.
   
7. Next, you will need to either select an existing Security Group or create a new one. Default security group doesn’t fit us because you want to open other ports to access you 11g XE database. You can keep default group and only access by SSH if local access from SQL*Plus command prompt is all you need. It’s also the safest way but for your playground, you might want more flexibility. For 11gXE instance you will probably want SSH access (port 22), SQL*Net access (port 1521) and APEX access (port 8080). I also like to open ICMP for ping. Be sure you understand what you are doing if you will be placing any sensitive data there. I also open it to the world (source 0.0.0.0/0) so anybody who knows the passwords or have correct shard keys setup, can get on your instance. You can limit it to your current IP only (and you can change the policy online if you IP changes later — use AWS Management Console). There are bunch of site that would tell you your public IP (providing you don’t use a proxy coming from another IP) like this one. To limit access from that IP only enter it in the source as xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/32. Of course, you can enter subnets too if you know what I’m talking about.
   
8. That’s it — all that’s left is click the “Launch” button.
   
9. You will then see your image as “pending” in the console and usually just seconds later it switches into “running” state. Note that it will take a minute or so to boot and launch sshd daemon so you can connect via SSH. You can also check console log by choosing “Get System Log” from the context menu (it does take few minutes usually so it will come back empty until then). The easiest way to connect is to choose “Connect” from the context menu — it will present you instructions to connect as root using the .pam key file you downloaded when creating your Key Pair earlier on. Note that if you are on Unix, you will need to set proper permission for your key to ensure safeguarding — chmod 600 AlexG.pem.
   
   You can also get the public IP alias from instance details as “Public DNS” – just select and instance and scroll details in the bottom pane. For that particular image, I also enable public key authentication so you can simply add your public key to oracle’s ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file — it’s already there with correct permissions. This way I don’t have to go via root every time.
   If you are a Windows user using Putty, you can convert your .pem file into Putty Private Key (.ppk) file following Marcin’s comment.
10. Database and listener will auto-start. You can open 11g XE web interface. In my example it’s http://ec2-50-17-156-24.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8080/apex/apex_admin for Administration and http://ec2-50-17-156-24.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8080/apex for APEX web user interface. Note that it’s not SSL connection so you don’t want to use it for any sensitive data unless you reconfigure to https. This is also the time you want to change passwords from default ones.
11. You can access your database over SQL*Net via sqlplus, SQL Developer or any other tool.
    
12. You will see the instance and EBS volume attached in your AWS Management Console. If you stop the instance, you will see that the EBS volume is still attached so you data is still there when you start it. If you terminate the instance, all you changes and data will be gone since the EBS volume will be detached and deleted. You can, however, launch another instance as many time as you want from the same AMI. Just make sure you change the passwords after the launch!

That’s all — you can now start playing with Oracle 11g XE without paying a penny (or very little), without consuming any resources on your own laptop/desktop and have as many of them running as you want. And you can always start from scratch if you screw something up.

That’s right folks! Playing with latest beta of free Oracle Database 11g Express Edition couldn’t be any easier than that. If you are using Amazon EC2, you can have a fully working image with 64 bit Oracle Linux and Oracle 11g XE database running in a matter of few clicks and a minute to get the instance to boot.

Image — ami-ae37c8c7
Name — pythian-oel-5.6-64bit-Oracle11gXE-beta-v4
Source — 040959880140/pythian-oel-5.6-64bit-Oracle11gXE-beta-v4

You can find it in public images and at this point it’s only in US East region.

If you never used Amazon EC2 before, see detailed step-by-step guide on how to get started with EC2 on the example of this 11g XE image.

This image works great with Amazon EC2 Micro instance and I configured it specifically for Micro instance. Micro instance costs you only 2 cents per hour to run or even less than 1 cent if you are using spot instance requests (and there is free offer for new AWS users as Niall mentioned in the comments).

So what’s there?

• Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.6 64 bit (I started with 5.5 and updated to the latest)
• Oracle Database 11g XE Beta (oracle-xe-11.2.0-0.5.x86_64)
• Database created and configured to start on boot
• APEX coming with 11g XE configured on port 8080 and remote access enabled
• 10GB root volume on EBS with 5+GB free for user data. You could store up to 11GB of data in 11g XE and there is a way to grow volumes if you need but for more critical use then playground, I’d allocate separate EBS volumes anyway.

Few things worth to mention:

• I enabled public key authentication (“PubkeyAuthentication yes” in /etc/ssh/sshd_config) so you can setup shared key to login directly as oracle OS user – just copy your public key to /home/oracle/.ssh/authorized_keys.
• SYS and SYSTEM password is “pythian”. Change it!
• ADMIN password in APEX is “pythian” — change it on the first login.
• Micro instance has 613 MB of RAM and no swap — no instance (ephemeral) storage.
• Oracle database and listener autostarts on boot. You can use /etc/init.d/oracle-xe stop/start as root too.
• listener.ora has been modified to include (HOST=) so that it starts on any hosname/IP.
• APEX remote access is enabled! DBMS_XDB.SETLISTENERLOCALACCESS(FALSE)
• Ports 1521 and 8080 are open to the world on local iptables firewall. You still need to configure proper Security Group to be able to access those ports.
• Access APEX on http://{public-ec2-ip}:8080/apex and admin on http://{public-ec2-ip}:8080/apex/apex_admin. There is currently an issue that APEX stops working after few minutes of run-time returning 404 code. Might be a bug in beta or installation issue (for example, I run it with no swap on Micro instance).

I will be keeping the AMI up to date as things develop so AMI id could change — check back here of just search public AMIs for the latest image. I setup short URL for this page — http://bit.ly/Oracle11gXE.

If you don’t know how to use Amazon EC2 – I recommend to read the second chapter of Expert Oracle Practices: Oracle Database Administration from the Oak Table. This chapter was written by Jeremiah Wilton who’s been long time playing with Amazon EC2 for Oracle before any of us even thought of it.

When few folks confirm that it works, I’ll submit an image vi http://aws.amazon.com/amis/submit.

Update 4-Apr-2011: Create v3 image – fixed typo in database passwords, fixed retrieval of public key for ssh login as root, changed startup sequence so that ssh keys are initialized earlier as well public key retrieval.
Update 4-May-2011: Created v4 image – Increased SGA size to 212M. Set large_pool to 32M (Automatic SGA management doesn’t do it’s job properly – this is why APEX was not working – not enough large pool memory allocated). Enabled DIRECT IO and ASYNC IO for filesystem – buffered IO slowed down things a lot. Now APEX is actually pretty usable on Micro instance. Remember that you can run it on large instance to run in comfort but you are overpaying since there is 2 CPUs in large instance and 7.5GB of RAM while you can’t use more than 1GB. Of course, you could disable Direct IO and use OS buffering to take advantage of more RAM but can’t leverage both cores with APEX (it limits capacity to a single core).
Update 23-Jul-2011: If you need to use networking services from APEX (like web-service, sending emails and etc) then you need to configure network ACLs for APEX_040000 user.

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.

Jeremiah Wilton will be presenting High Performance Oracle 11g in the Amazon Cloud at Collaborate 2010 – an updated version of his February RMOUG presentation.  For a preview, you can find both the white paper and presentation slides from RMOUG on our white paper page.  Currently scheduled for Monday, April 19, the session abstract reads:

The Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud is rapidly gaining acceptance as an enterprise-class Oracle platform. In this virgin territory, Oracle professionals need a complete understanding of cloud computing concepts and architectures. This session addresses the basics, and goes further, providing guidance on how best to optimize and configure Oracle for performance, stability and manageability in the cloud. Gain a complete understanding of Cloud Computing Learn the details of Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud Develop the knowledge needed to deploy and effectively manage high-performance Oracle services on Amazon EC2.

Related posts:

1. Free Oracle in the Cloud Seminar
2. May 5th, Seattle, Oracle in the Cloud Seminar
3. Oracle E-Business Suite in the Amazon Cloud