Amazon Web Services EC2 Cloud is full scale public data center offering services that are in many aspects far ahead of ancient practices present in regular IT environments. Fast provisioning and virtually unlimited scale make old fashioned server procurement and installations look like what they are - past century's practices. This article will not deal with usual objections to cloud computing revolving around change management difficulties ( how to incorporate new environment into the existing IT infrastructure ), security, reliability, performance etc. since we think that all those issues exist in internal, in-house IT departments, perhaps at even larger degree compared to what Amazon EC2 can provide. Cloud will not solve all IT problems but will at least dramatically increase IT productivity while eliminating capex and being able to carefully manage opex.

We are going to briefly describe how to migrate your existing Oracle databases and related applications to Amazon EC2 cloud. You are going to need to:

• document all database servers, application servers that application to be moved is using; describe how  clients are connecting to it; list all configuration files that need to be changed to point to new database servers:
• launch ( create ) Oracle database instances on AWS EC2 host from AMIs ( Amazon Machine Images )
• if target platform is the same as originating ( i.e. Linux ) then simply copy database files from your existing servers to AWS
• if source database in on different platform ( for example IBM AIX ) then use Oracle Data Pump to export data in compressed form; copy dump files accross and import to target database
• adjust application configuration files to point to newly created servers ( either use IP addresses supplied by Amazon's Elastic IP service or to use public host DNS names provided by AWS Route 53, or similar service )
• start database and application
• test if application is functioning properly
• turn on monitoring and schedule backups

At the end of this process you will have fully functional application running on Amazon EC2. Deployment timing will certainly be much shorter than if you performed same exercise in  corporate data center. This process can be repeated for as many applications and environments you need to have moved to AWS.

• Moving Your Apps to the Cloud at Cloud Expo 2011 New York
• Amazon Web Services Launches the Amazon Elastic Block Store for Amazon EC2
• CA's Support for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Facilitates Automating and Managing Applications Across Existing Internal Resources and the AWS Cloud