Oracle Spatial on Amazon EC2

This presentation has details on an Oracle Spatial implementation on AWS. http://download.oracle.com/otndocs/products/spatial/pdf/osuc2012_presentations/osuc12_gisasservice_walshbaynham.pdf

The summary is:

• Technical approach:

  ·   Oracle Database with Spatial

  ·   Deploy on Amazon EC2

  ·   J2EE Web Application Server

  ·   Multi-tenant Multi-user 100% Web software for Mapping and analyzing business data 
– eSpatial OnDemand GIS

  
  

  Amazon Overview

  ·      Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2)


  ·      Variety of Instance Types (CPU cores, memory...)

  ·      Pre-configured Amazon Machine Instances (AMI’s)

  ·      Availability Zones

  ·      Elastic Block Storage – EBS
 Simple Storage Service (S3)
 Elastic IP addresses


  ·      Load Balancing & Auto Scaling, More...

  Amazon Deployment:

  ·   Dedicated Database Server(s) with separate Web Application Servers

  ·   AMI - Oracle 11g DB & Redhat Fedora

  ·   Database on an EBS volume

  ·   ARCHIVELOG as normal – archive to a separate EBS volume

  ·   RMAN Backup to separate EBS volume

  ·   Copy backups to Amazon S3

  ·   EE & RAC or SE-1 with Standby DB

  ·   Backup from Standby DB

  
  

AWS CloudFront : points of interest when running Oracle

When using a content delivery network such as AWS CloudFront, one of the first questions is making sure the latest content is at the edge location.  The time-to-live (TTL) is set using the cache-control directive : Cache-Control max-age directive lets you specify how long (in seconds) you want the object to remain in the cache before CloudFront gets the object again from the origin server.  The minimum expiration time CloudFront supports is 0 seconds and the maximum is in the year 2038.   The default, if not set, is 24 hours.   Setting to 0 does not mean the web page will always go to the origin for its content.  It means that CloudFront delegates the authority for cache control to the origin, i.e. the origin server decides whether or not, and if for how long CloudFront caches the objects.

Using CloudFront with Oracle applications such as EBusiness Suite, Peoplesoft, or Siebel would be an interesting exercise as these products have very dynamic web pages.  There is the potential of pointing CloudFront to an AWS ELB which is front of an Oracle Applications deployment.  Not sure how much this would improve performance of the application?