Oracle plugs apps into Amazon's EC2 cloud

Businesses can now run Oracle's enterprise software on the Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud at no extra licensing cost, after the companies announced a certification deal.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) now fully certifies and supports a number of applications on Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) when they are run using Oracle VM virtualisation, the companies announced at Oracle OpenWorld on Sunday. The software covered is Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, Siebel CRM, Fusion Middleware, Database and (Oracle) Linux.

"Customers may use their existing Oracle licences on Amazon EC2 at no additional licence cost, or they may acquire new licences from Oracle," the companies said in a statement.

Computing resources can be provisioned from EC2 on an as-needed basis. This means that when running Oracle applications in the environment, customers will be able to "add or shed resources as needed, paying only for resources used", said Charlie Bell, head of utility computing services at AWS, in a statement.

Oracle and AWS said they plan to publish Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) based on underlying Oracle VM templates of some of Oracle's software. An AMI is a template used to store a map of application information to allow it to run within EC2. The new AMIs should help businesses cut implementation times for applications on EC2 "from weeks or days to minutes", Oracle said in a statement.

Those who use the AMIs will be able to take advantage of EC2 Load Balancing, Auto-Scaling and Reserved Instance pricing, along with other AWS-specific cloud technologies.

Initial AMIs will comprise of Oracle Linux, Oracle Database, Oracle E-Business Suite and aspects of the Fusion Middleware technologies, including WebLogic Server and Business Process Management. Future AMIs will include PeopleSoft Enterprise, Siebel CRM and Oracle's JD Edwards applications. Dates and prices were not available at the time of writing.