Amazon cuts cost of running Oracle's database in its cloud

The announcement is the latest move by Amazon to make its RDS service more attractive

Amazon Web Services now lets companies run Oracle's database for about 3 cents per hour, while at the same time adding more options for enterprises that want to move high performance workloads to the cloud.

The offering that makes this possible is Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service), which aims to offer cheap and resizable capacity, and take over many database administration tasks.

The last two months have seen Amazon step up its efforts to make RDS and its cloud a viable option for running databases. Improvements include using SQL Server Enterprise Edition without buying separate licenses, the general availability of its own MySQL-compatible Aurora database, and an increase of the maximum database storage size.

To that AWS has now added the ability to run RDS for Oracle on Amazon's T2 and R3 virtual server or instance families.

The T2 virtual servers are recommended for databases that don't use the full CPU often or consistently, but occasionally need to burst to higher CPU performance, such as for small workloads in test and development environments. Addressing both the environments is important as Amazon works to convince more IT departments that RDS and its cloud is indeed a viable option for running databases.

There are three T2 sizes to choose from: micro, small and medium, which cost US$0.035, $0.07 and $0.14 per hour, respectively. That compares to the M3 instances, which cost between $0.21 and $1.68 per hour. The T2 prices are also cheaper than Amazon's previous virtual servers.

The R3 family is optimized for memory-intensive applications and has the lowest RAM cost among Amazon's RDS instance types. Prices range from $0.455 to $3.64 per hour.

The R3 and T2 instance types are available with Oracle database versions 11.2.0.4 and 12.1.0.2. The databases are created using the "Launch DB Instance" wizard in the AWS Management Console.

For enterprises that don't want to use Oracle's database, Amazon's RDS service also lets them choose from MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL and Aurora.

Send news tips and comments to mikael_ricknas@idg.com

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