Introduction
As you may be aware, Exadata Express is coming to the end of its life. If you like us have found this platform both useful and affordable, then you will be wanting to know what’s next? Where in the cloud can I deploy my RAD (REST, APEX, Database) stack now? In this post I will explore an alternative which we have implemented here at JMJ Cloud.
Background
We have been using Exadata Express and JMJ Cloud for more than 2 years. During that time, we helped five of our clients implement Exadata Express. Use cases ranged from custom cloud point solutions to ERP Cloud PaaS extensions. I have also blogged about this platform on a number of occasions. Exadata Express offered a highly functional PaaS solution for as little as $175 a month. We (and our customers) were very happy with it. In fact, I thought this product was a sign that Oracle had finally turned the corner to becoming a major cloud player. It provided a very low barrier to entry with more feature rich alternatives ready and waiting when your business grew into them. This is essentially how AWS became so successful. One day you start with half a dozen EC2 servers for a couple of hundred dollars a month and a few years later you are spending a million dollars a month (think Netflix). Oracle on the other hand typically starts by charging a lot and then work their way up from there.
How did we Get Here?
A month or so ago, our Salesperson emailed us… Here is where I need to pause for a small rant. Why on earth, if you are selling automated cloud solutions should I ever have to deal with a Salesperson? I want a server; I know what size server I want, and I know how much I want to pay for it. From my perspective, having a Salesperson in the middle of this is expensive from Oracle’s point of view and extremely frustrating from my point of view. OK, back to the story… Our Salesperson reached out and said we could not renew our Exadata Express contract and oh, by the way, you have a month to get off the platform. After a little discussion (i.e. an hour of my time on the phone) we converted that 1 month into 3 months. We bought ourselves some runway, but we still needed another platform. Enter the Salesperson (again). After another one hour of my time he proceeded to explain the wonders of the Autonomous Database Cloud Service. Don’t get me wrong, this service shows a lot of promise and it is going to be great for our larger customers. At more than $1,200 per month, however, it is not going to fly for us or our smaller customers wanting to run the RAD stack in the cloud. It is nearly 7 times more expensive than Exadata Express. If you wanted to use Autonomous Database with APEX for a Cloud ERP extension and you need a DEV, TEST and PROD instance that is $3,600+ per month instead of $600 / month.
To add insult to injury, there is not even a button push migration path from Exadata Express to Autonomous Cloud. This means that even if you have the money to pay for Autonomous Cloud, you are going to have to fork more money to migrate.
To add insult to injury, there is not even a button push migration path from Exadata Express to Autonomous Cloud. This means that even if you have the money to pay for Autonomous Cloud, you are going to have to fork more money to migrate.
The Alternative
I would love nothing more than to say I whole heartedly recommend folks move to the Autonomous Database Cloud Service but that is not where I am going. The answer to our problem was in a service we have dabbled with before which is Amazon’s RDS (relational database service) service along with an EC2 (elastic compute) server running ORDS. I have never really been completely happy recommending this approach for the RAD (REST, APEX, Database) stack before, two things have changed to make this a much more appealing approach.
- You can now perform a full ORDS install on an RDS instance. This is thanks to new functionality in ORDS 19.1 which allows you to run the install as a user other than SYS. This is especially important now that REST services are no longer available in APEX alone.
- AWS have started making the latest version of ORDS available on RDS much sooner than they used to. For example, as of right now, September 2019, you can run ORDS 19.2 and APEX 19.1 on RDS, whereas Exadata Express is running ORDS 3 (ouch) and APEX 18.2.
Architecture
The diagram below shows the architecture we are using at JMJ cloud.
Cost Breakdown
Here is a cost breakdown for the above architecture.
Notes
- We did not go for provisioned IOPS (input output per second, A measure of disk speed) which means we get burst-able IOPS. This is fine for short bursts of activity but if you expect prolonged volume activity, you will want to pay for provisioned IOPS which will increase the cost.
- RDS service pretty much doubles as you go from db.t3.small (2GB RAM, 2 VCPU) > db.t3.medium (4 GB RAM, 2 VCPU) > db.t3.large (8 GB RAM, 2 VCPU), > db.t3.xlarge (16 GB RAM, 4 VCPU).
- With a DB instance especially, you are likely to be keeping it around for a while. This makes buying reserved instances (where you pay up front) very appealing. You can save upward of 40% this way.
Benefits
- You can schedule backups and minor DB patch releases automatically on AWS. With Exadata Express, you had to manually run an export. You can even set your backup retention period.
- You can perform point in time DB recovery.
- You have visibility to metrics and can create automated alarms to monitor the health of your database.
- You can configure your database with multi-availability zone redundancy.
- 18C of the Oracle database is available.
- You can perform button push DB upgrades in place. We can attest to this as we recently upgraded our new environment from 12C to 18C.
- You can install any APEX version you want, important if your App is tied to a specific APEX version.
- RDS has an integration with S3 (object storage) so you can copy files between the DB server and S3. This is great for ad-hoc data pump backups or moving schemas between DB instances.
- You have access to the database file system via UTL_FILE.
- You can create your own database wallets. This is especially important for a cloud environment which may need to use custom SSL certificates to gain entry into your company’s firewall.
- Using other AWS services becomes much easier. For example, we run Tomcat on HTTP and have an AWS Application Load Balancer exposed to the internet. AWS provides SSL certificates for free when using a load balancer. If you have access to your domain DNS, you can easily create a friendly URL for you APEX environment e.g. https://apps.abccorp.com
- If you need to send emails to customers from APEX that do not end up in their spam folder then AWS SES (Simple Email Service) is just a few clicks away. It creates an SMTP server which you can add to your APEX Internal Workspace and then any email you send from APEX gets sent out using SES. SES emails include the necessary DKIM information so that your email does not end up in your recipient’s spam folder (not something that could be said for Exadata Express).
- Once you have a load balancer in place, you could even load balance between two ORDS servers so that you have increased redundancy and scalability.
- You get a full ORDS install. This means you get to set the ORDS parameters the way you want them. This includes setting the JDBC connection pool, configuring Prehook, preprocess, postprocess, restEnabledSql and pagination maxRows. There is no way this is going to be available to you on the Autonomous Database Cloud Service.
Considerations
There is no perfect solution and there are certainly some things you should consider when moving to AWS.
- Although the database is almost fully managed by AWS, you are on your own with regard to the ORDS server. You need to standup an EC2 server and install ORDS, Tomcat, setup your load balancer etc. This means it is not as hands off as Autonomous Database Cloud Service.
- At time of writing, there is no way to install APEX PSE Bundle Patches to an RDS instance. Depending on the bug, this could be a big deal.
- For license included versions of the Oracle Database, Standard Edition 2 is way more affordable than Enterprise Edition. If you have specific use cases that require Enterprise Edition features, then keep an eye on your costs.
- Although AWS takes care of patching the DB server, you will be responsible for patching the EC2 server and upgrading Java, Tomcat and ORDS.
Conclusion
I am not saying RDS is a magic bullet that allows you to achieve the hands-off capabilities of the Autonomous Database Cloud Service at a fraction of the cost. If you have the budget and you want absolutely nothing to do with the underlying architecture, then Autonomous Database Cloud Service is for you. If you want lower level access to the database (and / or ORDS) but want to be absolutely sure the database itself is being backed up and patched for you then it offers a great alternative. If you throw in easy access to other AWS services, this soon becomes a very compelling solution.
After all, for developers, the health and welfare of the database is really the scariest part of running your own RAD stack. If AWS is essentially taking care of this for you, the rest is reasonably straight forward.
After all, for developers, the health and welfare of the database is really the scariest part of running your own RAD stack. If AWS is essentially taking care of this for you, the rest is reasonably straight forward.
Author
Jon Dixon, Co-Founder JMJ Cloud
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