Amazon data warehouse migration to Amazon Redshift

Informative video on moving an Oracle RAC and Hadoop based web log data mining solution to Amazon Redshift:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4KPPvEb_QI

AWS @ Oracle OpenWorld 2013 details

Learn everything you need to run Oracle on AWS and talk to solution architects to address any questions you have: http://aws.amazon.com/oracle/

Oracle WebLogic and Database on AWS

Presented at reInvent in 2012.  Full session here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1AjAKz73M8

McGraw-Hill success story starts here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=R1AjAKz73M8#t=2617

Oracle WebLogic and RAC on AWS architecture slide:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=R1AjAKz73M8#t=3192

Oracle RAC on AWS

Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) is not natively supported on AWS. The word natively is used because it is possible to run Oracle RAC in an AWS Direct Connect facility http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/.

There are a number of options when migrating an Oracle RAC database to AWS.  The option you use depends upon the reason RAC is being used.  For HA and fail over, AWS offers multi-AZ capabilities which can provide the same level of service.  For very large databases that require high transaction through put that can not be achieved on a single instance database, Direct Connect would be the solution.  Details on these options are as follows:
1. RDS with multi-AZ :  Oracle RDS is the managed database service from AWS.  Oracle RDS has builtin multi-AZ capabilities.  Because RDS is a managed service, AWS takes care of installation, configuration and management of the secondary database, the replication between AZs, and the fail over and fail back of the database instance.
2. EC2 with multi-AZ :  Running on EC2 requires the customer or partner to install, configure, manage, and take care of the replication.    Oracle Data Guard or GoldenGate can be used for replication.
3. Direct Connect : The AWS partner Datapipe runs RAC in a managed service model using Direct Connect.

Note: Remember that AWS RDS only supports databases up to 6 TB in size. Note this number changed to 6 TB in June 2015 after being 2 TB. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2015/06/amazon-rds-increases-storage-limits-to-6TB-for-piops-and-gp2/. Check the whats new web page for any updates related to Oracle on RDS.

Note:  The reason Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) is not supported on AWS is:
1. Multicast is not supported on the AWS network. An overlay network is possible on AWS: http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/06/overlay-networks-on-aws.html
2. AWS EBS is not a shared disk / clustered file system.
So, even if you use a solution such as Amazon EFS, GlusterFS, Zadara, SoftNAS, or custom NFS for shared disk you can not use RAC on AWS as you need multicast support.  More on Amazon Elastic File System (EFS): https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-elastic-file-system-shared-file-storage-for-amazon-ec2/ 

Horizontal Scaling of Oracle on AWS

Just came across this solution.
Parelastic: http://www.parelastic.com (MySQL only at this time)

I really enjoyed the 'sharding sucks' mantra.  Being an 'old school' Oracle guy, the new world answer to  database scaling is sharding...I think that is very naive.

I know of these two companies in this space as well:

Scalearc (MySQL and SQL Server)

Scalebase : http://www.scalebase.com (MySQL only at this time)

Oracle VLDB on AWS

As enterprise began to move to the cloud, the question of running very large Oracle databases on AWS is coming up.  Of course, the definition of a what is a VLDB varies by industry, size of company, and personal opinion.   For our discussion, let's say it is a 10's of TB database.  In this case, most Oracle databases of this size will be running on Oracle RAC.   Currently, Oracle RAC is not supported on AWS.

A method to get around the lack of support for RAC in AWS is running the application on EC2, and Oracle RAC in a co-location facility or customer data center. AWS Direct Connect allows establishing private connectivity between AWS and data center/co location or customer data center to achieve the speed required. Datapipe is one AWS hosting provider partner that has done this: 

http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/aws-partner-presentation-datapipe-deploying-hybrid-it-aws-summit-2012-nyc

Application on premise and database on AWS

It is possible to run an application on premise and run your Oracle database on AWS on EC2 or RDS.  However, in in this scenario, the network latency is typically to high and network bandwidth to limited to support most database systems.  This is where AWS Direct Connect comes in. AWS Direct Connect provides speeds of 1 GBPS to 10GBPS where as a typical internet connection speed of 100MBPS (100Base-T connection) would be significantly slower.  Keep in mind that an internal dedicated network from application server box to database server which would be 10 GBPS to 100 GBPS. If the application server and database server on on the same box there is no network latency. There are customers that run Oracle applications on EC2 and Oracle RAC databases in a co location facility using Direct Connect.