Amazon web services was started back in 2006 and provides companies with an infrastructure web services platform in the cloud. Their lauded benefits are pretty typical of cloud offerings in that they're cost effective, flexible, and pretty comprehensive. One major criticism I've heard is that they only supported MySQL and SQLServer as a database which prevented companies from exploring their use for ERP and other heavy footprint systems. That is until now, Amazon and Oracle have announced a service named Amazon Relational Database Service running Oracle Database. This service will run Oracle 11g with some interesting licensing options. The licensing options include:
- Bring your own license - use your existing license and apply it to Amazon RDS
- On-demand database instances - pay by the hour licensing
- Reserved database instances - make a one time payment for each instance for a 1 year or 3 year commitment
I am going to be watching this very closely because I think it's going to sprout some interesting business cases and provide some decent options to dip a toe into hosting, perhaps to just light up a demo install of EBS or PeopleSoft to kick it around. You can read more about this here.