I was able to successfully install Oracle Business Intelligence 10.1.3.4 in Amazon Web Services over the course of a few hours this afternoon and evening. The idea is to allow for customers of a friend’s consulting company to train on the instance. The whole exercise cost me $1.32, check out my statement 
Summary of This Month's Activity as of March 11, 2009
Billing Cycle for this Report: March 1 - March 31, 2009
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Rate Usage Totals
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
View/Edit Service
Amazon EC2 running Linux/UNIX
$0.10 per Small Instance (m1.small) instance-hour (or partial hour) 6 Hrs 0.60
$0.100 per GB Internet Data Transfer - all data transfer into Amazon EC2 4.713 GB 0.47
$0.170 per GB Internet Data Transfer - first 10 TB / month data transfer out of Amazon EC2 0.101 GB 0.02
$0.10 per GB-month of provisioned storage 0.228 GB-Mo 0.02
$0.10 per 1 million I/O requests 616,002 IOs 0.06
$0.01 per 1,000 puts (when saving a snapshot) 109 Requests 0.01
View Usage Report 1.18
Amazon Simple Storage Service
View/Edit Service
$0.100 per GB - all data transfer in 1.338 GB 0.13
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests 138 Requests 0.01
View Usage Report 0.14
Taxes
Estimated Taxes
(Due April 1, 2009)
0.00
Charges due on April 1, 2009† 1.32
I used a 40GB EBS volume which will store the data persistently for just $4.00 a month! The way I configured everything I can just spin up my Amazon Machine Image whenever I want and attach it to the volume. Within 10 minutes I have a running instance of OBIEE and when it’s not in use I can keep it on the shelf for just $4.00 a month (did I already mention that?). The other very big plus is I can snapshot the EBS volume so as soon as they are finished training I can destroy their volume and then return to the clean starting image when a new training is starting.
For a really professional look I’m going to register an Elastic IP address and have them forward training.domain.com to the public IP address. That way whenever he walks into a customers site he can just tell everyone to open a browser and ask them to go to the friendly URL. Also, I can lock down by public network IP address who is allowed to access the site, so they can make sure only the customers site is able to get to the training page.
One more thing, the same server is also running Oracle 10g XE in case they want to build some fancier data sets for their customers to train in.
Check out the cost breakdown
Data Transfer In – 100GB
Data Transfer Out – 100GB
Persistent Storage – 40GB
3 Snapshots of Persistent Storage – 40GB x 3 = 120GB
Hours of Compute time on a small instance – 80 hours
This would cost $57.00 monthly broken down by:
Compute – $8.00
Data Transfer – $27.00
EBS Volumes – $4.00
EBS Snapshots – $18.00
I received some feedback from a friend at Oracle who informed me I should check out Oracle’s Cloud Licensing document. It looks like they charge per core similar to a physical system with just a few small differences. Check out the document here.
Not bad compared to a lot more under a traditional hosted or data center environment. Plus no capital required! Check out the screenshot below of the web login to the public DNS name in AWS.
