First announced in December 2024, Oracle and AWS have announced the general availability of Oracle Database@AWS. This strategic partnership positions Oracle Exadata Database Service and Oracle Autonomous Database on dedicated Oracle Cloud Infrastructure within AWS data centers.
The service has reached general availability in two AWS regions (Northern Virginia and Oregon), with expansion planned to 20 additional regions.
The partnership between these two technology giants addresses a significant market gap by enabling enterprises to run Oracle workloads natively within AWS infrastructure while maintaining Oracle’s performance characteristics.
The offering combines Oracle’s database technology with AWS’s cloud services portfolio, targeting enterprises with existing Oracle investments seeking cloud migration paths.
Oracle Database@AWS
Oracle Database@AWS implements a sophisticated hybrid cloud architecture that fundamentally differs from traditional cloud database offerings. The service deploys complete Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) child sites within AWS data centers, creating a co-located environment that maintains Oracle’s full technological stack while operating within AWS’s physical infrastructure.
Infrastructure Deployment Model
The architecture consists of OCI child sites that function as extensions of Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, physically residing within AWS data centers. These child sites maintain bidirectional connectivity to parent OCI regions, enabling access to the broader Oracle cloud ecosystem while providing low-latency access to AWS services.
Hardware Platform
Oracle has integrated its latest Exadata X11M generation hardware into the offering, representing the most current iteration of Oracle’s engineered systems. Oracle tells us that this hardware delivers up to 30 times acceleration for AI workloads through enhanced AI Vector Search capabilities.
The minimum Exadata configuration requires two database servers and three storage servers, connected through Oracle’s proprietary high-speed RDMA-enabled network fabric.
This configuration can be expanded with additional database and storage servers based on workload requirements.
Oracle manages monthly security updates and quarterly infrastructure maintenance, allowing customers to specify maintenance windows that align with their business requirements.
Networking Architecture
The networking model employs a multi-layered approach designed to provide secure, high-performance connectivity between Oracle databases and AWS services. The ODB (Oracle Database@AWS) network functions as a private network segment hosting OCI infrastructure within specific AWS Availability Zones, and utilizes dedicated CIDR ranges for IP address allocation.
ODB peering connections establish direct network paths between Oracle Database@AWS instances and customer Amazon VPCs, enabling applications to access Oracle databases with minimal network overhead.
The recent integration with AWS Transit Gateway significantly expands connectivity options, allowing customers to connect applications across multiple AWS Availability Zones, regions, and on-premises environments to Exadata hardware running within AWS.
The network design includes support for cross-availability zone configurations, enabling disaster recovery capabilities within the same AWS region.
This multi-AZ support addresses high availability requirements while maintaining the low-latency characteristics essential for enterprise database workloads.
Database Platform Capabilities
The service supports both Oracle Database 19c and Oracle Database 23ai, with 23ai representing Oracle’s latest generation featuring embedded artificial intelligence capabilities. Oracle Database 23ai includes native AI Vector Search functionality, enabling semantic search across documents, images, and structured data based on conceptual content rather than exact keyword matching.
The platform maintains full compatibility with Oracle RAC, Oracle’s shared-disk clustering technology that provides both high availability and horizontal scalability. This ensures that existing Oracle applications requiring RAC can be migrated without requiring architectural modifications.
AWS Service Integration
The integration with AWS services operates through multiple connection points designed to minimize data movement and maximize performance. Zero-ETL integration eliminates the need for traditional extract, transform, and load processes when connecting Oracle databases to AWS Analytics services, enabling real-time data flow between Oracle transactional systems and AWS analytical workloads.
Native integrations include AWS IAM for unified security policies, AWS CloudFormation for infrastructure automation, Amazon CloudWatch for monitoring and alerting, Amazon VPC Lattice for service-to-service communication, and Amazon EventBridge for event-driven architectures. These integrations operate at the API level, providing programmatic access to both Oracle and AWS capabilities.
Management and Automation Framework
The service integrates Oracle’s database automation capabilities with AWS’s cloud management tools. Database lifecycle management tasks, including provisioning, scaling, backup, and recovery operations, can be initiated through the AWS Management Console while maintaining access to Oracle’s native database administration tools.
Oracle’s cloud automation implements database best practices for common administrative tasks, potentially reducing the operational burden on database administrators. The automation covers database creation, configuration management, performance tuning, and routine maintenance operations.
Scalability
The Exadata platform supports both horizontal scaling, achieved through the addition of database and storage servers, and vertical scaling, accomplished through online resource allocation adjustments. Customers can dynamically scale database consumption to match workload demand, ensuring uninterrupted service without service interruptions, addressing both planned capacity changes and unexpected load spikes.
The RDMA network fabric connecting Exadata components provides high-bandwidth, low-latency communication essential for distributed database operations.
This network architecture enables Oracle RAC to function effectively across multiple database servers, maintaining performance characteristics similar to those of single-instance deployments.
Performance Optimization
Oracle claims the Exadata X11M generation delivers enhanced performance through improvements in processing capabilities, storage optimization, and network efficiency. The platform features Oracle’s Exadata Smart capabilities, which offload query processing to storage servers, thereby reducing data movement and enhancing overall system performance.
AI Vector Search acceleration represents a significant performance enhancement for artificial intelligence workloads, with Oracle claiming up to 30X improvement over previous generations.
This acceleration targets machine learning applications, natural language processing, and similarity search operations, which are increasingly common in modern enterprise applications.
Availability and Resilience
The multi-availability zone deployment capability enables cross-AZ disaster recovery configurations, providing resilience against data center-level failures. Oracle RAC provides database-level high availability, while the Exadata platform includes redundant components designed to eliminate single points of failure.
Backup operations integrate with both OCI Object Storage and Amazon S3, providing flexible options for data protection and disaster recovery. Automatic backup processes operate within configurable maintenance windows, with retention periods ranging from 7 to 60 days. The backup architecture supports both local and cross-region recovery scenarios.
Monitoring and Performance Management
Integration with Amazon CloudWatch provides AWS-native monitoring capabilities, while Oracle’s database monitoring tools remain available for detailed database performance analysis. This dual monitoring approach enables both cloud operations teams and database administrators to maintain visibility into system performance and health.
Performance metrics collection encompasses both infrastructure-level indicators (CPU, memory, storage, and network) and database-specific metrics (query performance, transaction throughput, and lock contention). The monitoring integration supports automated alerting and integration with AWS operational workflows.
Impact to IT Practitioners
Oracle Database@AWS brings several benefits to joint AWS-Oracle customers:
- Operational Advantages: Database administrators gain access to familiar Oracle tooling while leveraging AWS infrastructure management. The service includes Oracle Zero Downtime Migration (ZDM) support for existing Oracle workloads, which can potentially reduce migration complexity and downtime risks.
- Management Simplification: Unified billing through AWS Marketplace and consolidated support from both vendors streamlines procurement and operations. Existing AWS commitments and Oracle license benefits, including Bring Your Own License (BYOL) and Oracle Support Rewards (OSR), remain applicable.
- Cost Implications: While specific pricing was not disclosed, enterprises can leverage existing AWS financial commitments. However, practitioners should evaluate the total cost of ownership, including potential dual-vendor support contracts and specialized skills requirements for managing hybrid OCI-AWS environments.
Analysis
Oracle Database@AWS is a significant strategic partnership that addresses enterprise cloud migration challenges for Oracle-dependent workloads. The offering provides a technically viable path for maintaining Oracle functionality within AWS infrastructure while enabling access to AWS’s service ecosystem.
The partnership addresses a clear market need among enterprises with substantial Oracle investments that seek AWS cloud benefits without requiring application re-architecture. Early adoption by prominent enterprises across regulated industries validates the approach for mission-critical workloads.
It’s an offering and partnership that strengthens both vendors’ positions in enterprise markets while creating new competitive dynamics in the cloud database sector.
Competitive Outlook & Advice to IT Buyers
Oracle’s partnership with AWS offers a differentiated approach to traditional cloud database offerings, maintaining Oracle’s full feature set and performance characteristics within AWS infrastructure.
The strategy addresses enterprise concerns about vendor lock-in while providing access to AWS’s broader service ecosystem…
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