Can you use Oracle RAC on Third-Party Clouds?

Q: Can you use Oracle RAC on Third-Party Clouds?
A: No.

The Licensing Oracle Software in the Cloud Computing Environment document states:

“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.”

The document that lists “these Oracle Programs” does not include RAC.

For more details check Markus Michalewicz’s (Oracle RAC Product Manager) white paper entitled: How to Use Oracle RAC in a Cloud? – A Support Question. The image about is slide 45/50 from the same paper.

And here is how to use Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) in the Oracle Database Cloud Service.

An interesting blog post by Brian Peasland entitled Oracle RAC on Third-Party Clouds concludes: “But if I were looking to move my company’s RAC database infrastructure to the cloud, I would seriously investigate the claims in this Oracle white paper before committing to the AWS solution. That last sentence is the entire point of this blog post.”

For business and mission critical applications I would by all means recommend Oracle Real Application Clusters on Oracle Bare Metal Cloud.

We should not forget that something works and something being supported are two totally different things. Even for the Oracle Cloud check the Known issues for Oracle Database Cloud Service document: Updating the cloud tooling on a deployment hosting Oracle RAC requires manual update of the Oracle Database Cloud Backup Module.

Conclusion: Oracle RAC can NOT be licensed (and consequently not be used) in the above mentioned cloud environments although such claims were published even yesterday in the internet (July 10, 2017).