Oracle Database@AWS Architecture and Solution Design
Oracle Database@AWS delivers Oracle Exadata Database Service and Oracle Autonomous Database on OCI-managed hardware located inside AWS data centers, ordered and billed through AWS. The Architecture and Solution Design domain tests whether you can choose the right database service, place it correctly, size it, and design connectivity for a workload.
Service selection
- Exadata Database Service: full Oracle Database on Exadata with RAC, Data Guard, Multitenant CDB/PDB, custom initialization parameters, and DBA-level control. The usual fit for E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, and applications that require RAC.
- Autonomous Database: the same Exadata platform with automated provisioning, patching, backup, and scaling. Choose it when the application fits its supported feature set and the team wants minimal administration.
Placement rules
- The service is region- and availability-zone-scoped: select an AWS region where Oracle Database@AWS is offered, and the Exadata infrastructure lands in a specific AZ.
- RAC protects against node failure inside one AZ; cross-AZ or cross-region protection needs Data Guard or Autonomous Data Guard.
- Size on cores, usable storage, and IOPS rather than peak sessions. Exadata shapes are coarse, and growth often means adding infrastructure instead of editing a slider.
Connectivity design
Keep latency-sensitive application tiers in the same AWS region and connect over private VPC-to-VCN peering. Database subnets should never need public IP addresses.
Worked example
An order-fulfilment service on Amazon EKS in us-east-1 needs a 3 ms p99 database budget, RAC, and a DR copy. Design: Exadata Database Service in Oracle Database@AWS us-east-1, AZ-a, with RAC for local HA; a Data Guard standby in AZ-b plus a second standby in another region for regional DR; the EKS VPC peers with the OCI VCN in the same region so traffic never crosses the internet. Reasoning: same-region private peering removes WAN latency, and RAC plus Data Guard satisfies both HA and DR without changing the application.
Traps
Assuming this is RDS-style managed Oracle with no DBA access; treating cross-region peering as automatic; sizing on average load; picking Autonomous Database for an app that depends on unsupported legacy features.