Amazon's consumer business fully sheds Oracle, moves on AWS

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SME Times News Bureau | 16 Oct, 2019
In what could give the ongoing bitter war between Cloud majors Oracle and Amazon Web Services (AWS) a rest, Amazon has announced it has completely shed legacy Oracle databases and its entire consumer business is now running on its own AWS databases.

"I am happy to report that this database migration effort is now complete. Amazon's consumer business just turned off its final Oracle database (some third-party applications are tightly bound to Oracle and were not migrated)," Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for AWS, Amazon's Cloud computing arm announced late Monday.

The company said it migrated 75 petabytes (one PB is 1,000 terabytes) of internal data stored in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases to multiple AWS database services, including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon Redshift.

"The migrations were accomplished with little or no downtime, and covered 100 per cent of our proprietary systems. This includes complex purchasing, catalogue management, order fulfillment, accounting, and video streaming workloads," Barr informed.

Top Oracle and AWS executives have been sparring over Amazon's abandonment of Oracle databases in its internal operations for some time.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy in November said that Amazon will take off all its workloads from Oracle databases by the end of 2019 and put those on its own database offerings.

"AWS decided to offload Oracle as its Cloud vendor and would soon be 100 per cent reliable without the need of hosting Amazon workloads on Oracle Cloud.

"Over the years we realised that we were spending too much time managing and scaling thousands of legacy Oracle databases," said Barr.

More than 100 teams in Amazon's Consumer business participated in the migration effort.

These included Alexa, Amazon Prime, Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Fresh, Kindle, Amazon Music, Audible, Shopbop, Twitch and Zappos, as well as internal teams.

According to Amazon, the migration has resulted in cost reduction, performance improvements and lowered administrative overhead.

"We reduced our database costs by over 60 per cent on top of the heavily discounted rate we negotiated based on our scale. Customers regularly report cost savings of 90 per cent by switching from Oracle to AWS," said Barr.

"Latency of our consumer-facing applications was reduced by 40 per cent and the switch to managed services reduced database admin overhead by 70 per cent," he added.

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.