Oracle RAC is stupidly complicated to administer. You are correct in your statement that a RAC environment generally does require a DBA team and the cost overh

Oracle RAC is stupidly complicated to administer. You are correct in your statement that a RAC environment generally does require a DBA team and the cost overhead is significant. Further, Oracle has very stringent hardware and OS certification and you will not receive any support from Oracle on uncertified systems. However, I would not associate it with the "cloud" movement/paradigm/whatever. It is a cluster (the C in RAC stands for cluster) with 2 or more instances sharing memory structures across a network. To add another node to the cluster is excruciating; I would not classify it as dynamically scalable - the hallmark of cloud computing.