Oracle Database on AWS User Guide

Overview

This Marketplace listing is a single product that ships six Oracle Database delivery options, all on Oracle Linux 8. You pick the one that matches your licensing and architecture when you launch. Each variant has its own focused deployment guide — choose your variant in the table below and open it.

Select Your Variant

Each guide covers launch from the Marketplace and the AWS CLI, SSH access, the per-instance credentials, connecting with SQL*Plus and SQL Developer, service management, storage layout, backup and security hardening — specific to that variant.

• Oracle Database 19c SE2 → — Long Term Support, Standard Edition 2, single non-container database on a filesystem volume.
• Oracle Database 19c EE → — Long Term Support, Enterprise Edition with the full option catalogue (Partitioning, Advanced Compression, TDE, Data Guard).
• Oracle Database 21c SE2 → — Innovation Release, Standard Edition 2, multitenant container database (CDB ORCL with pluggable database ORCLPDB).
• Oracle Database 21c EE → — Innovation Release, Enterprise Edition, multitenant with the full option catalogue.
• Oracle Database 19c EE with ASM → — Enterprise Edition on Automatic Storage Management via Grid Infrastructure / Oracle Restart (+DATA and +RECO disk groups).
• Oracle Database 21c EE with ASM → — Innovation Release, Enterprise Edition, multitenant on ASM with Grid Infrastructure.

Which Variant Should I Choose?

Release — 19c vs 21c. Oracle Database 19c is the Long Term Support release, covered by Oracle Extended Support through April 2027, and is the recommended target for new production deployments that do not yet need the 23ai feature set. It is a traditional non-container (non-CDB) database named ORCL. Oracle Database 21c is an Innovation Release — where Oracle first shipped blockchain tables, native JSON, immutable tables and in-database JavaScript — and is multitenant only: the database is always a container database (CDB) named ORCL with a pluggable database (PDB) named ORCLPDB inside it, and your applications connect to the ORCLPDB service.

Edition — SE2 vs EE. Standard Edition 2 provides the core relational engine within the SE2 licensing envelope of two sockets and sixteen user threads — suitable for line-of-business systems, application back ends and development databases. Enterprise Edition has no socket cap and unlocks the full option catalogue: Partitioning, Advanced Compression, Advanced Security (TDE), the Diagnostics and Tuning Packs, Data Guard and more.

Storage — Filesystem vs ASM. The filesystem variants keep the Oracle home and datafiles on a single dedicated 30 GiB gp3 EBS volume at /opt/oracle — the simplest layout. The ASM variants put the datafiles on Oracle Automatic Storage Management through single-instance Grid Infrastructure (Oracle Restart) — two raw EBS volumes form the +DATA and +RECO disk groups, with the Oracle homes on a separate 50 GiB /u01 volume. ASM gives you operational parity with on-premises Oracle estates (the same asmcmd and srvctl tooling and disk-group model), multi-volume IOPS aggregation and online storage management. The ASM variants are Enterprise Edition only.

What Every Variant Has in Common

Whichever variant you launch, the image shares the same operational shape, so the launch and access steps are the same:

• Oracle Linux 8 base image, with the SQL*Plus client in the Oracle home.
• No shared credentials — on the first boot of every instance a one-shot firstboot service generates strong random passwords for the SYSTEM and SYS accounts (and, on the ASM variants, the ASM administrative account), applies them inside the running database, and writes them to /root/oracle-db-credentials.txt with mode 0600 so only root can read them. Two instances launched from the same image never share credentials.
• Listener on port 1521, bound to all interfaces for remote SQL Developer and JDBC connectivity. Restrict it to trusted networks in your security group; never open it to the public internet.
• Recommended instance type m5.xlarge or larger (m5.xlarge is the SE2 baseline; Enterprise Edition has no socket cap).
• cloudimg 24/7/365 support with a guaranteed 24-hour response and one-hour average for critical issues.

The detailed launch, connection, management and storage steps — which differ by release, edition and storage type — are in each variant's own guide linked above.

Prerequisites

Before you deploy any variant you need:

• An Amazon Web Services account where you can launch EC2 instances
• IAM permissions to launch instances, create security groups, and subscribe to AWS Marketplace products
• An EC2 key pair in the target Region for SSH access to the instance
• A VPC and subnet in the target Region, with a security group allowing inbound port 22 from your management network and inbound port 1521 from the trusted networks that will reach Oracle
• The AWS CLI (version 2) installed locally if you plan to deploy from the command line

Support

cloudimg provides 24/7/365 expert technical support for these images. Guaranteed response within 24 hours, one hour average for critical issues. Contact support@cloudimg.co.uk.

For general Oracle Database and ASM questions, performance tuning and migration help, consult the official Oracle documentation: the Oracle Database 19c and 21c documentation sets and the Oracle Automatic Storage Management Administrator's Guide.

Oracle, Oracle Database, Oracle ASM, and related marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Oracle Corporation. Use of them does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by Oracle Corporation.