{"id":7793,"date":"2020-11-23T16:51:15","date_gmt":"2020-11-23T16:51:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rax-stg-wp-aws.com\/blogs\/overview-of-the-benefits-of-ebs-on-aws\/"},"modified":"2026-11-03T19:29:03","modified_gmt":"2026-11-03T19:29:03","slug":"overview-of-the-benefits-of-ebs-on-aws","status":"publish","type":"blogs","link":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/blogs\/overview-of-the-benefits-of-ebs-on-aws\/","title":{"rendered":"Overview of the benefits of EBS on AWS"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Most enterprises consider Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems mission-critical, and&nbsp;there is a growing appetite for cloud adoption during greenfield, upgrade, and migration&nbsp;projects. Through my experience of managing Oracle\u00ae E-Business Suite\u00ae (EBS) projects on both traditional on-premise and public cloud environments, I&#8217;ve learned that AWS\u00ae&nbsp;offers considerable advantages over on-premise platforms.<\/p>\n<p><strong>&nbsp;Why AWS?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Following are some AWS use cases for EBS projects:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Migrating existing on-premise production environments<\/li>\n<li>Performing greenfield implementation of new production environments<\/li>\n<li>Implementing disaster recovery on the cloud<\/li>\n<li>Running development, test, demonstration, proof of concept, and training environments<\/li>\n<li>Using temporary environments for migrations, testing upgrades, and performance testing<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Enterprises continue to invest in enhancements to EBS, but they are tired of the high cost&nbsp;involved and the slow speed at which they can deliver these projects. A single EBS production&nbsp;system generally requires you to install and support multiple Oracle applications and&nbsp;database environments.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>These multiple environments then support functional setup, development, system and&nbsp;user-acceptance testing, data migration and data conversion, training, performance testing,&nbsp;and pre-production quality assurance. The cost and management effort associated with these&nbsp;multiple environments can mount up quickly.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Hosting EBS on the AWS Cloud can be a very cost-effective solution for your environments&nbsp;because of its inherent flexibility. By shutting down instances outside working hours, you&nbsp;can save on costs because you pay for the EC2 instances only when they are running.&nbsp;<br \/>\nAlso, AWS instance scheduling can significantly reduce the cost of your multiple&nbsp;non-production environments by up to 71%. This savings estimate comes from an example of 29%&nbsp;monthly uptime, from 8 am to 6 pm, Monday to Friday, 21 workdays per month, 10 hrs per day.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>EBS on AWS: Sample architecture and features<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The diagram in the following image shows how you can set up EBS on AWS. This model deploys&nbsp;the application and database instances in multiple availability zones for high availability.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/blog_article_images\/26506-body-Picture1_27.png\" alt=\"ebs aws pic 1\" \/><\/p>\n<p><em>Figure 1. Oracle E-Business deployment across two availability zones&nbsp;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>High availability and elastic load balancing<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>You can use <em>elastic load balancing<\/em>&nbsp;to distribute user traffic to multiple application&nbsp;instances deployed in separate availability zones. You can then add or remove application&nbsp;instances from your load balancer configuration without disrupting data flow. Elastic load&nbsp;balancing detects which instances are healthy and available. If an application instance&nbsp;fails, the load balancer routes traffic to the remaining healthy instances. In the event&nbsp;of an availability zone failure, the load balancer routes traffic to the remaining application&nbsp;tier instances in the secondary availability zone.<\/p>\n<p>The Oracle database is deployed on two EC2 instances in different availability zones. OracleData Guard\u00ae replication is configured between the primary database in availability zone&nbsp;1 and a standby database in availability zone 2. If the primary database instance fails,&nbsp;the system promotes the standby database to be the primary, and the application instances connect to the new primary.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Scalability&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>With AWS, you can vertically scale the application and database tiers up or down by&nbsp;changing the EC2 instance type and then restarting so that the &nbsp;changes take effect. This&nbsp;operation should take only a few minutes. The storage volumes remain attached to the&nbsp;instance, and data migration is not required.<\/p>\n<p>You can horizontally scale out the application tier by adding and configuring additional&nbsp;application instances. You can launch a new EC2 instance in a few minutes, but you&#8217;ll need&nbsp;to do some additional configuration work to ensure that the application configuration files&nbsp;are correct and the new application instance registers with the database.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>You can automate horizontal scaling of the application tier by using custom-written DBA&nbsp;shell scripts. However, this requires a significant level of technical effort and skill. A&nbsp;simpler alternative might be to use standby instances to meet extra capacity needs. You can&nbsp;preinstall additional application instances and configure them with EBS on standby EC2&nbsp;instances. Keep these instances shut down until you need the extra capacity. You pay for&nbsp;minimal storage costs, but you don&#8217;t pay for shut-down EC2 instances.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Storage and backups<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The application and database instances use Elastic Block Storage volumes for persistent&nbsp;block storage. EBS has two types of solid-state drive (SSD) volumes:&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Provisioned IOPS SSD for latency-sensitive application and database workloads<\/li>\n<li>General-purpose SSD that balances performance and cost<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You can use general-purpose SSD volumes for boot volumes, the EBS application tier file&nbsp;system, and logs. They offer single-digit millisecond latencies and deliver a consistent&nbsp;baseline performance of three IOPS\/GB up to a maximum of 10,000 IOPS per storage volume.<\/p>\n<p>Provisioned IOPS volumes provide the best-performing EBS storage option, so you can use&nbsp;them with Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) for storing the database data and log&nbsp;files. You can provision up to 20,000 IOPS per volume with single-digit millisecond&nbsp;latencies, and they deliver the provisioned IOPS 99.9% of the time.<\/p>\n<p>You can use Oracle ASM to stripe the data across multiple EBS volumes for higher IOPS and&nbsp;to scale the database storage without downtime.<\/p>\n<p>Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) provides scalable, highly durable, low-cost storage, and&nbsp;it works for storing database backups. Use Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) to back up the&nbsp;database and then copy the RMAN backup file to Amazon S3. Or use the Oracle Secure Backup&nbsp;(OSB) Cloud Module to back up your database directly to S3 for storage.<\/p>\n<p>Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) is an NFS-compatible shared file system, which you can use to provide a common data source if the Oracle instances require file sharing.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Benefits of AWS for EBS<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The following are some benefits of using AWS for EBS:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Agility and speed<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Traditional on-premise deployments involve a long procurement process requiring large&nbsp;capital spend upfront and multiple approvals. You can provision new infrastructure and EBS&nbsp;environments in minutes in AWS with no upfront cost or commitment.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>&nbsp;Cost savings for non-production environments<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Shut down non-production environments when you are not using them to save costs.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Flexible environment provisioning<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>With on-premise environments, you usually have a limited set of environments to work with.&nbsp;Provisioning additional environments takes a long time or may not even be possible. By using&nbsp;AWS, you can create as many new environments as you need in minutes.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>You can use a different environment for each major project so that each team can work&nbsp;independently without interfering with each other. The teams can then merge their work in a&nbsp;common integration environment at the appropriate time. When the project finishes, you can&nbsp;terminate these environments and stop paying for them.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>&nbsp;Flexible environment sizing and scalability<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>With on-premise deployment, environments for initial phases are sometimes oversized or&nbsp;undersized, and infrastructure teams cannot cope with growth in later project phases. With&nbsp;AWS, you can scale your instances up or down at any time, paying for the capacity you use and&nbsp;for its duration of use.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>&nbsp;Ability to test application performance&nbsp;<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The typical performance testing environment for an EBS project is a full-sized replica of&nbsp;the production environment because load testing needs to run on a representative environment.&nbsp;You use this highly spec-ed environment only during testing, and it is a costly CapEx&nbsp;investment with a traditional on-premise approach.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>You should conduct performance tests before any major change to an EBS environment. Because&nbsp;of high costs, some customers only performance test their application during the initial&nbsp;phase using the to-be-deployed production infrastructure. They might never performance test&nbsp;later releases due to the expense and lack of a necessary performance-testing environment.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>A performance test environment can be created easily and quickly for just the performance-test&nbsp;cycle duration and used only when needed on AWS Cloud. You can save on costs again by only&nbsp;paying for the capacity you use while you use it.&nbsp;<br \/>\n&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>AWS can be a very cost-effective, scalable, secure, and flexible platform for deploying EBS.&nbsp;Rackspace Technology can help you design, build, and maintain a highly available EBS system&nbsp;on AWS to meet your business requirements. We can help you address the following key project&nbsp;requirements:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Architecture and migration services<\/li>\n<li>Application and database upgrades<\/li>\n<li>System implementation and integration<\/li>\n<li>Design of cost-effective environments mapped to your business requirements and budget<\/li>\n<li>Environment planning, automation, cost optimization, Disaster Recovery testing<\/li>\n<li>Environment sizing, build, configuration, testing<\/li>\n<li>Security, compliance, and identity management<\/li>\n<li>Backup and recovery planning and testing<\/li>\n<li>Performance testing and tuning, proactive monitoring<\/li>\n<li>Information life-cycle management<\/li>\n<li>Identity and access management and single sign-on<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Overview of the benefits of EBS on AWS<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7795,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","nid":"26506","content_type":"blog","created_by":"10130","authored_on":"2024-01-14T16:51:14+00:00","field_article_industries":"","tag_category":"Technical","field_blog_author_text":"by Rackspace Technical Staff","seo_description":"Learn how to handle memory pressure alerts caused by memory-optimized tables in SQL Server. Find solutions for memory pressure scenarios.\r\n","field_featured_image":"","insights_image":"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/blog_technical_images\/26506-insights_image-aws-technical-blog-1-insights.png","field_partners":"","rxt_platforms":"Oracle, Oracle E-Business Suite, Amazon Web Services (AWS)","product":"","publisheddate":"2020-11-23T16:51:15","rxt_solutions":"Cloud Management & Operations, Applications","opengraph_tag":"","x_tag":"","teaser_flag":"Technical Blog","seo_titile":"Benefits EBS on AWS | Rackspace Technology","field_topics":"","field_slug":"overview-of-the-benefits-of-ebs-on-aws","footnotes":""},"categories":[178],"tags":[204],"class_list":["post-7793","blogs","type-blogs","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-technical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blogs\/7793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blogs"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/blogs"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7793"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blogs\/7793\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9675,"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blogs\/7793\/revisions\/9675"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rackspace.com\/en-gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}