20 cents an hour! Who's got that kind of dough?

In these trying economic times, I thought it would be prudent to try to save some money on the cost of my Cloud experiment. (Although a colleague of mine pointed out that my actions were "anti-stimulative.") I wanted to downsize my machine to the 10 cent per hour machine described as:

Small Instance (Default) 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform

I didn't want to have to start from scratch; I wanted to keep the database and all the applications that I installed intact. But how could I do that? I knew full well that once I shut my instance down everything was gone. This is where the beauty of Amazon's Elastic Block Storage (EBS) comes in. It allows you to create persistent volumes that you can then attach, format, and mount on an EC2 instance. If you shutdown the EC2 instance for any reason your EBS volume persists and you can then mount it on another EC2 instance.

EBS has its own charges and I estimated it would cost me about $18 per month for my 10GB volume. But I am saving about $72 month by decreasing my hourly costs by 10 cents, so my net savings will be more than $50 a month. Not bad.

So the idea is that I create an EBS volume, move all the database files necessary to run the database to that volume, and then start a database using those data files on the cheaper machine. With some help from my friends at the Oracle Cloud Computing Center, I was able to do just that and I have detailed the steps below.

First I needed to create my EBS volume. This is very simple using Elasticfox and detailed in the Elasticfox Getting Started Guide. Click on the Volumes and Snapshots tab and then the create icon. Enter the size in GB (I chose 10) and also choose an availability zone. This is important since you can only attach EBS volumes in the same availability zone as your EC2 instance. My instance was in the us-east-1b zone so I chose that.

Now that I have the EBS volume I attached it to my instance by going to the Instances tab in Elasticfox, right clicking on my instance, and choose Attach an EBS volume. I gave it a device name of /dev/sdf1. Next I need to format the volume as a file system before I can use it so I issue (as root):

$ mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdf1

Figure 1, Create an EBS volume

Mount it to a temporary place, like:

$ mount /dev/sdf1 /mnt

My instance had a mount point of /u02 which contained all of the file necessary for my database including the datafiles, control files, redo log files, etc.

$ df -m

Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 9647 7116 2042 78% /
none 871 539 332 62% /dev/shm
/dev/sda2 342668 3000 322262 1% /u02

I copied all those files to the temporary mount point on /mnt. First I shutdown the database or the files will be unusable.

$ su - oracle
$ sqlplus / as sysdba
SQL> shutdown immediate
SQL> exit
$ cp /u02/* /mnt/
$ exit #this will return me to the root user

Finally I un-mounted the current /u02 mount point and remount /dev/sdf1 to /u02. I only did this to prove I can start the database using the EBS volume with these data files. If I can't start the database using this EBS volume mounted as /u02, I don't want to proceed until I can.

$ umount /dev/sda2
$ umount /dev/sdf1
$ mount /dev/sdf1 /u02
$ su - oracle
$ sqlplus / as sysdba
SQL> startup

In my case, the database started up so I did a shutdown immediate. I un-mounted /dev/sdf1 and then detached the EBS volume from this instance. I kept this instance available until I successfully started the database on the new smaller instance.

SQL> shutdown immediate
SQL> exit
$ exit
$ umount /dev/sdf1

With the database shutdown and the EBS volume detached, I created a snapshot of the volume. The snapshot is a point-in-time backup of the EBS volume and it is stored using Amazon's S3. Once I have a snapshot, I can create new EBS volumes based on that snapshot. This gives me the flexibility of shutting down all instances and deleting my EBS volume, and then I only pay S3 storage charges. I can create a new EBS volume based on this snapshot sometime in the future, start an EC2 instance, attach the EBS volume and I am good to go.

Figure 2, Create a snapshot of the EBS volume

Next, I started a new instance using the same 11gR1 32 bit AMI on a smaller instance with Elasticfox. It was important that I chose the same availability zone as my EBS volume, us-east-1b.

Figure 3, Launch the smaller EC2 instance

I connected to the instance using Putty and chose "No" when asked if I wanted to create a database at this time. This gave me an instance with the Oracle software installed in an Oracle home, but without a database. Now for the magic. I created a /u02 mount point under /, attached the EBS volume to this instance as /dev/sdf1, and then mounted it to /u02. To start the database on this instance I also needed to set my ORACLE_SID environment variable and create symlinks in $ORACLE_HOME/dbs to the spfile and password file in the admin directory on /u02.

$ mkdir /u02
$ mount /dev/sdf1 /u02
$ su – oracle
$ export ORACLE_SID=orcl
$ cd $ORACLE_HOME/dbs
$ ln -s /u02/admin/orcl/dbs/spfileorcl.ora spfileorcl.ora
$ ln -s /u02/admin/orcl/dbs/orapworcl orapworcl
$ sqlplus / as sysdba
SQL> startup

And my database started on the new 10 cent/hour machine!

Test Drive Oracle Application Express 3.2 for 60 cents (USD)

Would you like to kick the tires of Oracle Application Express 3.2 on your own instance but do not have the spare hardware? Do you have 60 cents (USD)? Read on.

Amazon has a service called the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) where you can fire up virtual machines in the cloud on a whim. They have partnered with other software vendors to provide images with pre-configured software. Oracle is one of those vendors and you can read about the offerings at the Oracle Cloud Computing Center on OTN. Oracle has an image which contains Enterprise Linux and Oracle Database 11g R1.

The purpose of this post is to describe how I started an 11g R1 instance in the cloud, upgraded it to Application Express 3.2, and then completed the "Converting Your Oracle Forms Applications to Application Express 3.2" and "Utilizing Improved Security Enhancements in Application Express 3.2" Oracle By Example tutorials (OBEs). If you can spare 60 cents you may wish to try this yourself at home.

First, you need to get your AWS account in order. Sign up for AWS at the previous link and then sign up for EC2. Review the EC2 pricing and then establish a payment method. If you already are a customer of Amazon.com you can choose one of the credit cards you have on file or establish a new one. Unfortunately, there is no infrastructure in place for you to insert two quarters and a dime for this test drive.

Now you are going to need to get some software to startup an instance, manage it, and transfer files to it. Get the Elasticfox Firefox plug-in and review the Getting Started Guide. The Getting Started Guide will give detailed instructions on associating your AWS EC2 account with Elasticfox and also creating a KeyPair that you can use to identify yourself when connecting to the machine. You need to download Putty & PuttyGen to connect to your instance via SSH. You should download WinSCP to transfer files to your instance. Finally you need to download Application Express 3.2.

The keypair that you created when reviewing the Elasticfox Getting Started Guide needs to be converted to a format that can be used by Putty and WinSCP. You can use PuttyGen to create this key. Simply start PuttyGen, click load and browse to find the .pem keypair file you created with Elasticfox, then click Save private key to save it as a .ppk file.

Figure 1, Creating a .ppk from your .pem with PuttyGen.

You are ready to view Deploying Oracle Database in the Cloud viewlet that is available on the Oracle Cloud Computing Center page on OTN. The viewlet will show you how to find and start image ami-cecb2fa7 which is 32bit Enterprise Linux with 11g. It will take you through creating and configuring the database. I chose to start a c1.medium instance type which costs 20 cents/hr and is described as:

High-CPU Medium Instance 1.7 GB of memory, 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 350 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform

Figure 2, Instance Details

You manage the instance by connecting via SSH and you can use Putty as the viewlet demonstrated. Before you can connect to the machine on port 22 from your computer you will have to specifically allow it from your IP address. In Elasticfox first identify the Security Group used to start the instance. It is most likely called "default" unless you added another Security Group. Click the Security Group tab, highlight default and then click the green checkmark under the Group Permissions pane to add a permission. You can either allow a specific host or a network range. Allow your host to connect on port 22 and then create another permission to allow anyone to connect on port 8080 wich is the default port that EPG will be listening for HTTP requests. You choose Network and allow 0.0.0.0/0.

Figure 3, Creating a Security Group

Before logging in to Oracle Application Express on this instance, I had to change the password for the Application Express ADMIN account by following these steps (which changed the password to oracle):

su - oracle
sqlplus / as sysdba
SQL> @?/apex/apxxepwd oracle

Login to Oracle Application Express and create a workspace.

Figure 4, Create a Workspace

Now for the fun part. Start WinSCP and connect to your instance and copy apex_3.2.zip there.

Figure 5, Copy apex_3.2.zip to your instance

Return to your Putty terminal session connected to your instance and install Oracle Application Express 3.2:

su - oracle
unzip apex_3.2.zip
cd apex
sqlplus / as sysdba
SQL>@apexins SYSAUX SYSAUX TEMP /i/
SQL>@apxldimg /home/oracle

Follow Joel's blog post on making Application Express run faster. You are ready to complete the Converting Your Oracle Forms Applications to Application Express 3.2 and Utilizing Improved Security Enhancements in Application Express 3.2 Oracle by Example (OBE) tutorials. An easy way to get the files for the Forms OBE to your machine is to run the following command in your terminal session:

wget http://www.oracle.com/technology/obe/apex32/files/forms_conversion.zip

Figure 6, Application Express 3.2 in the Cloud!

So there you have it. Test drive your own instance of Oracle Application Express 3.2 for around 60 cents (USD). For a limited time (until my manger finds out), you can try out my cloud instance using the following application linked below. I have configured my cloud instance to use the APEX Listener, which is a Java based HTTP listener that should release with the next version of Oracle Application Express.