New Pricing For Amazon RDS Running Oracle Database To Build, Test and Run Low-Traffic Apps

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added  a new pricing option for its Relational Database Service (RDS) running on Oracle with a micro instance. The addition follows announcements over the past few months about Oracle on AWS.

According to AWS, the new option means users can build, test, and run low-traffic, database-backed applications at a cost starting at $30 per month ($0.04 per hour) using the option with the license included.

Jeff Barr writes on the AWS blog that if you have a more intensive application, the micro instance enables you to get hands-on experience with Amazon RDS before you scale up to a larger instance size.

Earlier this month, AWS announced support for Oracle Data Pump. The Data Pump is a feature that was added to provide a faster way to import and export data to and from Oracle databases.

In August, AWS announced three new features for Amazon RDS for Oracle:

  • Amazon RDS for Oracle in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
  • Oracle XML DB to store, retrieve, navigate, and query XML documents
  • Oracle Application Express (APEX) to build web applications

Why all the moves? Oracle Open World starts this week. That may be part of the reason.

Oracle is planning to launch what Larry Ellison called “12c” in the company’s earnings call last week. The “c” in 12c stands for cloud. Ellison said virtualization is a key aspect of the database, helping Oracle be more cloud friendly.

Oracle also plans to launch its own version of a cloud infrastructure. Here’s what Ellison said in the earnings call:

Our new Infrastructure as a Service offering provides secure, virtualized, compute and storage services. In the Oracle Cloud or — and this is very important — an identical infrastructure service installed in our customer data center as an Oracle-managed private cloud, customers can easily move their applications from traditional custom and packaged applications to our modern Fusion SaaS applications, back and forth between the Oracle Cloud and their private cloud.

Take what you will from that but it is not exactly cloud computing. More so, it’s Ellison trying to sell Oracle’s stack on its hardware. How this fits with AWS? We’ll see next week.