Recently, Amazon announced it has completely shed legacy Oracle databases and its entire consumer business is now running on its own AWS databases. Read on to know more…
Recently, Amazon announced it has completely shed legacy Oracle databases and its entire consumer business is now running on its own AWS databases. In the raging competition between Amazon and Oracle, Amazon’s abandonment of Oracle databases in its internal operations for some time is now completed. More than 100 teams in Amazon’s Consumer business participated in the migration effort.
Migration
According to Amazon, the migration has resulted in cost reduction, performance improvements and lowered administrative overhead. The Oracle to AWS migration project took several years and recently wrapped up, AWS evangelist Jeff Barr said in a blog post. More than 100 consumer services have been moved to AWS databases. These included customer-facing tools like Alexa, Amazon Prime, Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Fresh, Kindle, Amazon Music, Audible, Shopbop, Twitch and Zappos, as well as internal teams. It also moved internal tools like AdTech, its fulfillment system, external payments and ordering. These are not minor matters. They are the heart and soul of Amazon’s operations.
Each team moved the Oracle database to an AWS database service like Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and Amazon Redshift. Each group was allowed to choose the service they wanted, based on its individual needs and requirements.
According to Amazon, the move involved 75 petabytes of internal data stored in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases. “I am happy to report that this database migration effort is now complete. Amazon’s i Consumer business just turned off its final Oracle database (some third-party applications are tightly bound to Oracle and were not migrated),” AWS’s Jeff Barr wrote in the company blog post announcing the migration.
Over the last several years, Amazon has been working to move off of Oracle databases, but it’s not an easy task to move projects on Amazon scale. Barr wrote there were lots of reasons the company wanted to make the move. “Over the years we realized that we were spending too much time managing and scaling thousands of legacy Oracle databases. Instead of focusing on high-value differentiated work, our database administrators (DBAs) spent a lot of time simply keeping the lights on while transaction rates climbed and the overall amount of stored data mounted. This included time spent dealing with complex & inefficient hardware provisioning, license management, and many other issues that are now best handled by modern, managed database services.” he wrote.
Cloud Enterprises
AWS teams undoubtedly learned some lessons about how to deploy IT assets thanks to the migration effort. In June this year, Cloud rivals Microsoft and Oracle announced an interoperability partnership enabling customers to migrate and run mission-critical enterprise workloads across Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud.
Enterprises can now seamlessly connect Microsoft Azure services, like Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), to Oracle Cloud services, like Autonomous Database. The move was seen as an effort by Oracle to offset losses in the fierce competition coming its way from AWS.
