STEP is supported in the following major cloud providers:
- Amazon Web Services – AWS
- Microsoft Azure Cloud – When deploying STEP in Azure it must be observed that the Azure feature Accelerated Networking is a requirement for servers being part of a STEP environment.
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure - OCI – The DBaaS on VM shapes has not been certified.
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Classic - OCI Classic – The Database Cloud Service (DBCS) on SSD storage has not been certified.
All requirements (network and storage) must be fulfilled as described and in the Infrastructure Recommendation being generated. These requirements are the same regardless of how and where the environment is hosted, and whether it is a physical or a virtual environment.
Hybrid Setup
A hybrid setup, where some servers are placed on the premises and others in the cloud, is not supported. Such a setup does not fulfill the performance requirements, especially related to network performance.
Oracle Licensing in AWS and Azure
When licensing Oracle in the cloud, see the Licensing Oracle Software in the Cloud Computing Environment paper published by Oracle, which describes how licensing works. This paper is available online at http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/cloud-licensing-070579.pdf.
Oracle updated this document on January 23, 2018, indicating that within AWS (EC2 and RDS) and Azure, Oracle Standard Edition 2 may only be licensed on instances up to 8 vCPUs. If licensing Database Standard Edition 2 by Named User Plus metric, the minimums are 10 NUP licenses per 8 Amazon vCPUs or 8 Azure vCPUs. Contact your Stibo Systems representative for the latest update on how AWS and Azure handles this.