AWS Database Migration Service

By CIOReview | Tuesday, May 25, 2021

FREMONT, CA : It is no mystery that corporate customers have had a rocky relationship with their old-school database vendors for decades. The trend is the same: the databases are costly, proprietary, built for lock-in, and have harsh licensing terms. As a result, a large number of customers have accelerated their move to AWS Cloud databases. Reduced capital and operating costs, increased IT staff efficiency, scalability, a modern and open architecture, a pay-as-you-go model that only charges for services used, and the market value made possible by AWS's unrivaled rate of innovation are all things they want.

One of the largest IT organizations by sales, Samsung Electronics moved over 1.1 billion users from Oracle to Amazon Aurora across three continents. This resulted in a 44 percent reduction in their monthly database costs. To modernize their monolithic architecture and move to a microservices-driven architecture, Experian, a global leader in credit reporting and marketing services for customers and companies, migrated their customer platform from Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon DynamoDB. As a result, they managed annual data layer volume growth of up to 75 percent while cutting server deployment time from 60 to 90 days to just hours. Then there is Dow Jones, one of the biggest corporate and financial news organizations in the world. They were almost two weeks ahead of schedule in migrating their business data platform from an on-premises SQL Server solution to Aurora, and they saved over 50 percent on costs.

Hundreds of thousands of customers have used AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS) to migrate their databases in the last few years. AWS DMS is a completely managed service that enables customers to move their relational, non-relational, and data center databases to AWS with minimal downtime. More than 350,000 databases have been migrated to AWS using the AWS Database Migration Service as of November 2020. Customers such as Samsung, Experian, Pokémon, Jack in the Box, AgriDigital, Dow Jones, Expedia, Bristol-Meyers Squibb, and others are continuing to migrate their databases to Amazon Web Services. AWS DMS supports 19 migration sources and 15 migration goals, reflecting the diversity of customer requirements. Customers record substantial cost savings after migrating—up to 90 percent in some cases.

Even though the cost savings are significant, there are additional benefits: By embracing the advancement of AWS databases and analytics services, AWS enhances security, improves traditional IT 'ilities' like availability and scalability, and creates business value.