RE: CEO's head in the Cloud
- From: "Matthew Zito" <mzito@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <niall.litchfield@xxxxxxxxx>, <moabrivers@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jun 2010 17:56:03 -0400
Also, you can build your own AMIs without much difficulty, and run any
database you want on it. We have AMIs running 10gR2, 11gR1, and 11gR2 -
no big deal.
The real benefit of Amazon ec2 is elasticity - since you pay by the
compute-hour, you can spin up 50 extra web servers during peak times,
and spin them up where you need them (i.e. Asia, US, Europe), and then
when the peak passes, spin them back down again. That model doesn't
work as well with the database, but from a performance/latency
perspective, it probably helps if the database is also running in the
cloud, rather than having to traverse a VPN link back to your internal
datacenter.
Matt
________________________________
From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Niall Litchfield
Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 2010 5:49 PM
To: moabrivers@xxxxxxxxx
Cc: oracle-l
Subject: Re: CEO's head in the Cloud
Hi LB
I hate to break it to you but it isn't true that databases hosted on
AMIs are unsupported.
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/cloud/index.html would be a good
place to start. Jeremiah Wilton wrote a chapter (chapter 2 in fact) on
Oracle in the cloud in the Expert Oracle Practices book and there's a
presentation at http://www.bluegecko.net/download/Cloud.pdf. So cloud
computing isn't a non-starter per se. That doesn't mean it will be a
good fit for you, you for example use RAC for some reason, presumably
scalability; and dataguard for another, presumably HA as well as
geographic redundancy which AWS pretty much eliminates the need for. You
need to think about how you might satisfy those requirements in the
cloud, you might well not satisfy them of course.
I think the answer to the performance question would be to do some end
to end tracing of your app from various geographic regions and see where
the time goes, comms to the web server, web server time, comms to the
app server, app server time, comms to the db server, db time. That'll
give a real clue about end user experience in Iraq vs CA.
Niall
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 10:12 PM, LB <moabrivers@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
My CEO just came back from a technology conference where his head became
filled with lots of ideas including the idea that we should abandon our
hosted datacenters and push everything into the Cloud, specifically
Amazon's. A cursory review of the offerings for this show that the
databases are hosted on Amazon virtual machines that aren't officially
supported by Oracle and thus require a premium support contract from
Amazon.
Aside from my personal feelings on the matter (that I'd much rather have
a tangible set of servers that are under direct control), what are your
pros/cons for pushing or not Production level OLTP databases into the
cloud. I notice right now that they currently only offer 11g1 on 64-bit
an not 10g 64-bit or 11g2 64-bit so it would appear they arent covering
all of their bases. Presently we're RAC on 10.2.0.4 64 bit and use
dataguard to a different datacenter for geographic redundancy. I note
also that Amazon doesnt support RAC instances at present.
His driving push is that somehow Amazon's cloud will mean better
performance throughout the world as somehow the network throughput will
be magically enhanced so someone in Iraq will get the same speed hitting
the application as someone in California. I don't agree with that
either but I dont have empirical proof. Our databases presently are
highly available, highly optimized, and highly redundant. But, they
aren't buzz word stamped "Cloud." Sigh.
--
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info
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