Former work mate Jeremy Schneider is always the first to look at interesting ways to use Oracle RAC – now he’s considering to run a BYO Oracle RAC on Amazon EC2. I kinda defeats the purpose of cloud, but it’s still fun the play with.
So what’s the right way to use the cloud for DB scalability (specifically RDBMS, not SimpleDB), you may ask? It’s through sharding, and the fine folks at Xeround and Microsoft are already heavily investing in making that easier and more transparent for developers.