Oracle will support apps running on Amazon EC2

IDG News Service - Oracle customers will now be able to deploy a range of Oracle software on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service in production form, the companies announced Monday at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

Oracle is fully supporting and certifying E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, Siebel CRM, Fusion Middleware, its flagship database and Linux distribution on EC2, albeit running inside Oracle's own Oracle VM virtualization technology, not Amazon's.

Amazon's virtualization engine had been a sticking point against customers who wanted to run production versions of applications like E-Business Suite on EC2, since it lacked Oracle's stamp of approval. Instead, Oracle suggested customers could use EC2 for development and testing instances.

Customers can migrate Oracle licenses to EC2 for no additional fee, or buy new ones. Deployments will be aided by upcoming Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), with the first batch covering Oracle's Linux, database, E-Business Suite and Fusion Middleware.

The announcement dovetails with Oracle's own cloud-related announcement on Sunday. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled the Exalogic Elastic Cloud, a combination of hardware and software that, much like EC2, provides a virtualized pool of infrastructure that can shift resources to applications in response to demand.

But Oracle intends Exalogic to be run behind customers' firewalls. So far, the company has made no indication it plans to open a public cloud service like EC2 on its own.

Other aspects of Oracle's cloud computing strategy could be revealed Tuesday, during a keynote by Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of product development.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com