ELB time out

The default time out on AWS ELB is 60 seconds.  There's a 17 minute max for ELB timeouts, but the connection from ELB to the backend app servers is persistent by default. You have to manually request the change to adjust the front-facing timeout value.  Detail here: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=110299.

Bulk loading data to AWS from on premise

I spoke about bulk loading data to AWS in this blog post:

http://cloudconclave.blogspot.com/2013/04/on-premise-application-replication-and.html

A couple other options I did not mention are:

1. Apera - Asperasoft Company has developed a proprietary file transfer protocol based on UDP, which has shown to introduce very high-speed file transfer experience over the Internet.

2. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ElasticMapReduce/latest/DeveloperGuide/UsingEMR_s3distcp.html   Apache DistCp is an open-source tool you can use to copy large amounts of data. DistCp uses MapReduce to copy in a distributed manner  You can also use S3DistCp to copy data between Amazon S3 buckets or from HDFS to Amazon S3.  Since it is based upon MapReduce, it is most applicable when moving HDFS and other map reduce files as you will obviously have MapReduce installed in your environment. 

Encrypting Oracle Databases on AWS

Cipher Cloud offers an alternative to Oracle Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) to encrypt Oracle database tables.http://www.ciphercloud.com. The product specifics can be found here: http://www.ciphercloud.com/database-encryption-and-tokenization.aspx.  It is an option for those customers running Oracle SE or Oracle SE One on EC2 or RDS as TDE is only for Oracle EE. 
Salesforce uses CiperCloud to encrypt the Oracle database. Salesforce runs one of the largest Oracle RAC implementations in the world.