29. september 2010, 16:41
The concept behind the Amazon Cloud solution (ec2) is fantastic. It means that you can be up and running with you own virtual machine in only a few clicks. Being an Oracle APEX Developer I often need to install new servers for either development, inhouse or sometime external customers who wants to run their application in the Cloud. Installing the complete APEX “stack” can be quite time consuming (if you want: Optimization, mail and reporting capabilities).
So i created a public “AMI” created in the EBS storage. This means it can be started with all instance types (machine sizes), even the new “micro” machine, which costs $0.025 per hour (about 18 $ per month). The machine is dedicated to running Oracle APEX in a no-license cost environment.
The machine includes:
- Oracle XE (10.2.0.1)
- APEX (4.0.1)
- APEX Listener (1.0.2)
- Tomcat6
- Apache2 (mod_jk for APEX listener integration)
- APEX FOP (Printing PDF in intercative reports)
- Mail
- Jasper Reports (APEX integration by Ditmar Aust)
In other words all the stuff you need to develop and run APEX applications in the cloud.
Installation
Well, all you need is an Amazon cloud account. Once you have this, log in to the Management console, and create a new machine from the AMI called :
- id : ami-8c7b4ef8
- name : mbndata-oracle-apex-community-ubuntu-10-04-LTS
Note: The AMI is currently only available in the EU West Region.
Creating a new instance by right-clicking the AMI like this, and choosing “launch instance”

As soon as the instance is running, you can access the machine (SSH for remote logon), and http for APEX access. The url for APEX is : http://<Public DNS name>/apex.
Ex. : 
http://ec2-46-51-190-111.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com/apex
You can use “Elastic IP” to give the server a static IP adress which you can then link to your preferred domain.
Please note: The password to any administrative APEX or unix user is “manager” (so please change this right after creating the machine). The only APEX workspace which is created, is the DEMO workspace (log on with demo/demo). This workspace contains sample application (database and websheet), plus the demo application for iReport integration (by Ditmar Aust). For iReport testing, use the port 8090 instead of 8080.
Thats it.

Please note that the machine comes “as is”, simply as a help to the community. It has NOT been through extensive testing, so before using this for mission critical applications, please handle issues such as backup, security etc.
Enjoy
Martin B. Nielsen