AWS RDS database encryption

There a couple of ways to encrypt you data at rest when using AWS RDS:

1. Oracle RDS TDE support : http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2013/04/18/amazon-rds-oracle-encryption
2. Oracle RDS with Ciphercloud : http://www.ciphercloud.com/database-encryption-and-tokenization.aspx.  AWS specific here (and mentions HIPPA) : http://www.ciphercloud.com/aws-encryption-ciphercloud.aspx

Oracle TDE also supports encryption at the network tier. 

EBS volume encryption

Here are two companies that offer EBS volume encryption:

1. SafeNet ProtectV

     A. Support for boot volume encryption

     B. Good integration with Hardware Security Modules (HSM)

     C. Somewhat limited OS support  

2. Trend Micro SecureCloud

      A. Good support for RAID arrays

      B. Supports IAM roles for EC2 Instances, HSM support 
      C. Support for root volume encryption

           D. Supports AWS Storage Gateway as well as EBS volumes

Oracle RDS timezone

The default time zone for your RDS instance is UTC and cannot be changed on the DB. You can set the desired timezone (EST) per database connection. The time zone will only be valid for the connection therefore it needs to be done for each connection (and each time you connect).

The following page outlines  how to do this http://aws-musings.com/amazon-relational-database-service-rds-the-timezone-problem

Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c - Monitoring Essentials test drive lab

App Associates and AWS just announced a new test drive lab.  This test drive lab demonstrates how OEM 12c can be used to monitor and manage on premise Oracle environments in the cloud.

http://awslabs.appsassociates.com/oemdb-registration.php

AWS RDS cross region replication

RDS offers a simple way to replicate across AZs (Multi-AZ feature) for fault tolerance and high availability.  RDS cross region synchronization / replication provides additional fault tolerance.  This is an interesting situation because RDS is a 'black box'/PaaS/DaaS environment. Therefore, no access to the OS level is provided. This means this replication solutions like MySQL Replication or Oracle Goldengate can not be used.  Until RDS offers snapshots like the new EBS region snapshotting, you will have to use tools like BitTorrent or CloudBeam to move database dump files across regions.You could use DB links with materialized views as this article mentions: http://aws.amazon.com/articles/4173109646282306. DB Links are slow but if you don't have a low RTO and RPO you could use this...Or come up with your own creative solution.

Oracle WebLogic with AWS Auto Scaling

The question of using Oracle WebLogic with AWS Auto Scaling and propagation of session state is often asked.  Before getting into the details, let's look at the two ways of handling session state at the server layer (using cookies in the browser can be used as well):
1. Session stickiness : session data issue is to send all requests in a user session consistently to the same backend server. 
2. Session in database : Another solution is to keep the per-session data in a database.  Of course, AWS ElastiCache, SimpleDB or DynamoDB, or RDS.

If the session is stored in a database, nothing needs to be done when using Auto Scaling with WebLogic; for obvious reasons.

When sticky sessions is used, nothing needs to be done, but the reason is not so obvious so let's discuss it.

When a request comes into a WebLogic cluster via a load balancer (AWS ELB for example) or through Apache (mod_proxy_balancer plug in) the first time,  WebLogic creates an HTTP session on the primary node and also puts session state on a backup node. (You can provide guidance/control where to put the failure/backup).  If the server goes down that contains the primary WebLogic node, the new primary node will know where the backup session is stored and the session state will automatically get replicated to the new node.  So when AWS Auto Scaling is used there is nothing that needs to be done from an AWS perspective. 

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.