ELB primer : A good place to start

If you are just starting off with ELB or even if you have worked with it for some time, here is a helpful blog post:

http://harish11g.blogspot.com/2012/07/aws-elastic-load-balancing-elb-amazon.html

I like these points in particular: 

Point 4) Amazon ELB is not designed for sudden load spikes /Flash traffic 

Note: Not for traffic that changes ever few seconds or even every few minutes.

Point 8) Amazon ELB cannot do Multi AWS Region Load Balancing

Note: Use Route53

Point 9) Amazon ELB sticks request when traffic is generated from Single IP

Note: I see this a lot in training classes as students are always hitting from same IP address.

Point 12) Amazon ELB can easily support more than 20K+ Concurrent reqs/sec

Note: In most cases, one ELB can support multiple systems.

On premise application replication and snap shots to AWS for DR

When devising an disaster recovery approach that used AWS for DR of an on premise environment, there are literally hundreds of options for keeping the databases in sync. Each relational database vendor will have five of their own options and their partner ecosystems will offer many more.  For the application, it is different situation.  Their are not many features built into business application  and application servers.  Depending on what DR scenario you are using http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2012/11/aws-four-dr-scenarios.html you will be using either replication or snapshots to keep your AWS application in sync with your on premise environment.  
For warm standby and active-active you will need replication:

• RSync : Rsync is cheap (free) and easy.  Rsync can be chatty, does not have compression built in, and you have to code parallelism. 
• BitTorrent : BitTorrent is most often associated with moving large media files over the Internet in a fast matter. BitTorrent now has file syncing capabilities so can be used to sync application server files.  
• Amazon Storage Gateway " attach these volumes as iSCSI devices to your on-premises application servers.  These files will be stored in S3 where they can be instantiate as EBS volumes.

Riverbed Whitewater - http://www.riverbed.com/products-solutions/products/cloud-storage-whitewater/ https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B007O0FXW4/ref=srh_res_product_title?ie=UTF8&sr=0-2&qid=1366938137611#product-detail

Attunity CloudBeam - http://www.attunitycloudbeam.com/solutions/disaster-recovery  https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00B5PB8IM/ref=srh_res_product_title?ie=UTF8&sr=0-3&qid=1366938015695

For backup and restore and pilot light you can use snapshots. 

• FTP or SFTP : FTP and SFTP are the two most common methods to transfer files over the internet.
• HTTP or HTTPs : HTTP and HTTPS can be used but they are slower than S/FTP.  However, if you don't want to require or can not have an FTP client in use than HTTP(s) can be used.  Some companies may not want to open up another port to the outside world have an FTP server running.
• AWS import/export : If files don't need to be synced that often, FedEx, UPS, or Post Office can be the least expensive method with the least amount of hassle (limited coding, no restarting needed)
• Attunity CloudBeam to move files into S3 and than instantiate as EBS volumes.

Oracle EBusiness Suite does offer rapid clone http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E18727_01/doc.121/e12841/T120505T120517.htm but this is not for moving production system data files but for setting test, dev, or moving a system to another machine. Weblogic also offers a cloning feature :http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E12839_01/core.1111/e10105/clone.htm

Oracle specific protocol support on AWS ELB

Some Oracle customers are running Oracle specific protocols and when they move to AWS they would like to know if AWS services (such as ELB) support these products.  AWS ELB supports the HTTP, TCP, HTTPS and SSL protocols.  Oracle UCM IDC protocol is not supported with AWS ELB.  In looking at common on premise software and hardware load balancers (F5, Riverbed etc), I do not see any that support Intradoc (IDC).  The more important question to ask is: "What load balancer do you use on premise to load balance IDC traffic?"  If it is a software load balancer, you could run this on an EC2 instances.>

Another protocol that some Oracle customers run is Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP). SDP is an industry-standard wire protocol between InfiniBand network peers. When used over an InfiniBand network, SDP reduces TCP/IP overhead by eliminating intermediate replication of data and transferring most of the messaging burden away from the CPU and onto the network hardware.  This protocol is not supported on AWS.