Oracle technology underpins countless organizations across the globe. From retailers to airlines, and from financial services to the public sector, it’s the database of choice for many enterprise workloads.
These are typically powerful, high I/O systems that form critical parts of the organizations. Without them, many can’t function. This is why it’s so important for these workloads to run on well-architected foundations. Traditionally, these will have been on-premises, but as the various cloud platforms have matured, so more organizations are asking us to help move their enterprise workloads to the cloud.
AWS EC2 is often the customer’s cloud platform of choice, preferred to the AWS RDS managed service for its greater flexibility, which is essential for enterprise-grade workloads. If your organization is considering moving an important Oracle workload to AWS, there are some key points to think about as you begin your journey
Moving Oracle to AWS: Five things you need to know
1: The architecture will be different from onpremises
Running Oracle enterprise workloads in the cloud is very different from running them on-premises. For one, you’re using someone else’s hardware and networks – over which you don’t have the same levels of control as you do on-premises. This means you must ensure the architecture is capable of delivering the necessary availability, performance, security and disaster recovery capability.
2: Enterprise-grade workloads are different from web-based apps and services
Oracle workloads are also very different from the web-based apps and services that have been deployed to AWS in their thousands over the years. Here again, the architectural approaches used for AWS-based web services can’t simply be replicated for enterprise-grade Oracle workloads, if you’re to deliver the levels of service the business demands. Make sure you understand the differences, so that you can architect robust AWS solutions for your critical Oracle workloads.
3: Understand and address the integrations
As critical parts of an organization, Oraclebased systems rarely work in isolation: it’s typical for an Oracle workload to support tens or even hundreds of different applications and processes. These may be on-premises, they may already be in AWS, or they may be hosted in another cloud provider. When you’re moving the Oracle workload to AWS, you need to address all of these integrations, to ensure they’ll continue to work seamlessly. Latency can be a particular challenge, and addressing it may involve leveraging dedicated networking solutions, or moving parts or all of these linked systems to the cloud as well.
4: Be clear on the licensing
Another thing to keep in mind when deploying Oracle workloads on AWS, are the licensing considerations. This is a complex area, and it’s important to ensure you’re able to run your Oracle workloads on AWS sustainably, by being license-compliant, while also getting maximum value from the licenses you own. Indeed, Amazon itself points customers to independent third-party license review firms, to assist with this, and this is a sentiment we agree with.
5: Monitoring and managing the platform is different
Running workloads in the cloud changes the monitoring and management requirements. On the one hand, responsibility for the infrastructure passes to AWS. On the other, you’ll need to think about areas such as cloud consumption monitoring, to keep control of your spend.
Investing to support our customers
We’ve been seeing a growing number of enquiries about taking Oracle enterprise workloads to AWS. This is why we’ve been investing heavily in our skills, tools and methodologies in this area, getting our people certified and becoming an AWS Global Advanced Consulting partner. We’ve drawn on our experience of architecting platforms for enterprise-grade workloads, both on-premises and more recently in the cloud, to provide a complete, end-to-end discovery, design, delivery and management offering. The future of enterprise workloads is multicloud, with customers choosing a variety of providers for a variety of reasons. By making the investments that we have, we want to be ready to support you as you go on these transformation journeys.
We have assessed 5,769 Oracle databases running on 3,163 hosts and 15,629 CPU cores in the last twelve months. The total license value - database and options used - exceeds $690 million, with $150 million in annual support fees (based on list prices).
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