Database freedom: Amazon finally migrates from Oracle database to AWS

After several years of starting the process, Amazon has now completed its internal database migration effort. Even though Amazon’s AWS has several different database products, several Amazon
customer-facing brands and sites such as Alexa, Amazon Prime, Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Fresh, Kindle, Amazon Music, Audible, Shopbop, Twitch, and Zappos, as well as internal teams such as AdTech, Amazon Fulfillment Technology, Consumer Payments, Customer Returns, Catalog Systems, Deliver Experience, Digital Devices, External Payments, Finance, InfoSec, Marketplace, Ordering, and Retail Systems were using Oracle databases for various purpose.

Due to high licensing costs and poor performance, Amazon has now migrated their 75 petabytes of data to multiple AWS database services including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon Redshift. Amazon mentioned that these migrations were accomplished with little or no downtime.

Amazon even published a video showing the shutdown of the final Oracle database and how their team celebrated the same.

Here’s why Amazon migrated from Oracle:

• Cost Reduction – We reduced our database costs by over 60% on top of the heavily discounted rate we negotiated based on our scale. Customers regularly report cost savings of 90% by switching from Oracle to AWS.
• Performance Improvements – Latency of our consumer-facing applications was reduced by 40%.
• Administrative Overhead – The switch to managed services reduced database admin overhead by 70%.

Source: Amazon