RAC and Authorized Cloud Environments

18th August 2023

Someone asked can we create RAC databases on Azure or AWS. This is my Understanding of the way things are. It may be simplistic and as always its not legally enfoceable so do not take this as any kind of legal or contractual advice.

Interpreting publicly available documents from oracle in the strictest sense it would be a license violation to create a RAC database on any of the public clouds that fall under the oracle public cloud agreement ( Licensing Oracle Software in the Cloud Computing Environment) also known as Authorized cloud Environments.

"This policy applies to cloud computing environments from the following vendors: Amazon Web Services – Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Microsoft Azure Platform (collectively, the ‘Authorized Cloud Environments’). This policy applies to these Oracle programs." 

https://www.oracle.com/assets/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf

The Oracle Programs ( basically license options and capability ) are listed in this pdf 

https://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/authorized-cloud-environments-3493562.pdf

Real application clusters is not in the list in the above PDF so you are not licensed to use RAC in Authorized cloud environments.

However do note that with any oracle documents it states

"This document is for educational purposes only and provides guidelines regarding Oracle's policies in effect as of June 11, 2020. It may not be incorporated into any contract and does not constitute a contract or a commitment to any specific terms. Policies and this document are subject to change without notice. This document may not be reproduced in any manner without the express written permission of Oracle Corporation."

So if you really really really want to use RAC directly in AWS or Azure using something like flashgrid you will need to write that into your contract with Oracle or you could leave yourself open to lawsuits as you are not contractually allowed to use your RAC licenses in an Authorized cloud environment.

I would love for someone to give me a better explanation but this is what I have gathered in my time working with Oracle.

As I stated before this is just my opinion and should not be taken to be any form of legal or contractual advice.