28 ms·

Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database

927 points by jeffbarr 7y ago

jedieaston 7y ago
Is this not a case study that anyone can leave Oracle now, if an Amazon scale install can?
- vkaku 7y ago
  It shows that a big company like Amazon, hiring thousands of SDEs still needed other vendors software than their own, because of all that time they spent in hiring and firing people and obsessing over their customers needs. sarcasm
  - vkaku 7y ago
    Also, MySQL is technically, an Oracle database (after Sun got bought out). Now they should write some migrations to turn all of that off. sarcasm intensifies
    - deweller 7y ago
      I expect the internal teams use Amazon Aurora instead of MySQL. Aurora is compatible with MySQL but is not owned by Oracle.
      - vkaku 7y ago
        Yeah but the client interfaces are all MySQL. Oracle should buy off PostgreSQL too. And then it should start charging only Amazon for using these interfaces. moar sarcasm.
    - gerdesj 7y ago
      MariaDB - https://mariadb.org/about/ https://mariadb.org/about/
      - vkaku 7y ago
        There was also MaxDB, and a few other that Monty built. There's also Percona, WebscaleSQL and a few other forks. Amazon have been using MySQL even before all these forks happened. And not only that, if Oracle decided to pursue a lawsuit, or if MariaDB, Percona, Elasticsearch or EnterpriseDB did, Amazon will have to cough up. This is not really a thing that Amazon should be bragging about, because it makes no real sense! They still run a lot of software they did not write.
        jhall1468 7y ago
        Note: Amazon employee, but opinions are mine. Amazon did not replace Oracle with MySQL. You seems to talk a lot given your knowledge of how Amazon operates internally and how licensing works is... blatantly false. All of those DB's that could "pursue" a lawsuit are built on open source licenses which Amazon is not violating. But the most important point here: The idea that you have to write a database to be happy to be off Oracle is insane. Amazon moved to an alternative that doesn't have a deep license designed to financially screw their clients as much as possible. That's a win.
        vkaku 7y ago
        1. When did I say that Amazon replaced Oracle with MySQL? I just said that MySQL is an Oracle database. 2. Open Source licenses that Amazon is not violating - a 3rdparty lawyer would be able to ascertain better about the extent of legality on Amazon's changes and its contribution back to open source software than you and I do. 3. Ex-Amazon employee here. My comments are purely based on my observation - and purely my opinions. Why can't I talk a lot?
        jhall1468 7y ago
        1. I assumed it was implied. Why else bring it up? 2. If there was a means to sue Amazon for hosting databases, Oracle would have already done it a LONG time ago with MySQL. The burden is on you to prove your claim. 3. You are free to talk as much as you want, just expect push back when you aren't right, a lot. ;)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - StreamBright 7y ago
    No, it means that Amazon reached the point of considering other solutions than Oracle (I bet partially because of cost) at the time when this project started to move their database workloads that at the time were residing on Oracle to something else. Amazon uses many software vendors, they by no mean suffer from the NIH (not invented here) plague.
- lawnchair_larry 7y ago
  Or is it a case study that you need the resources of Amazon to pull off migrating from Oracle?
- mmsimanga 7y ago
  > some third-party applications are tightly bound to Oracle and were not migrated Oracle's strategy of buying companies like PeopleSoft is paying off.
- AshwinDurairaj 7y ago
  SAP and Salesforce would love to, but haven't achieved Oracle-free status to the joy of Larry.
  - notzuck 7y ago
    S4 doesn't use Oracle, Commerce doesn't use Oracle. Some of the acquisitions still do because nobody wanted to free up cash.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  It is not. Amazon accomplished the task by building their own Oracle replacement. You have to be approximately as large as Amazon for that to be a realistic option. If you'd like to use the alternatives that Amazon built, you can, of course, migrate to Amazon Web Services. Though, if you dislike the vendor lock-in you're experiencing with Oracle, and are considering Amazon as a good place to flee to, you possibly haven't been paying attention. With Oracle, you're just renting the software. With Amazon, you're renting both the software and the hardware, and renting the hardware is a precondition of being able to continue using the software, AND they charge you a fee to move your data off of their hardware. It's one of the most well-engineered enterprise vendor lock-in traps the industry has ever seen.
  - cwyers 7y ago
    Most places likely aren't using Oracle at Amazon's scale, either. I suspect that one of MySQL, Postgres or Microsoft SQL Server can fill in for Oracle if you have access to the source code and can make changes yourself. (If you've bought software that is Oracle-only, then it's not an option -- but it wasn't an option for Amazon, either). I suspect that in a lot of cases, this will pay for itself, but it might take 10 years to do so.
    - sovnade 7y ago
      Depending on the size of your install, there are companies that are very good at converting over something like Oracle to Postgres for probably much less than you'd expect. With the price of oracle licensing, your break-even could be in a year or two.
    - bilbo0s 7y ago
      >Microsoft SQL Server Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
      - mumblemumble 7y ago
        MSSQL's really not too bad. Yes, it's a commercial offering, but there's nothing inherently evil about charging money for software, and you do get what you pay for. I've worked in both MSSQL shops and PostgreSQL shops, and, while I wasn't in charge of the budget, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that, once you factor paying your programmers and DBAs for their time into the equation, the MSSQL shop ended up having lower overall costs associated with its choice of DBMS.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Just because Bill Gates has the resources to buy a fleet of 747s doesn't mean I can.
- StreamBright 7y ago
  I think the approach can be applied to many companies. I have seen some companies turning every single data storing problem into an Oracle problem. Amazon turned many of the problems into ones that are easier to solve. Using 6 different technologies[1]. I am sure not all applies to all departments but it is a better approach to do this at the scale they got. For small companies this really does not matter. If your hot data fits a single node disk cache you obviously won't benefit from using a horizontally scalable database but Oracle's customers are often in the higher end of the scale spectrum. The question is how can Amazon compete with Oracle where the relationship is there for decades between a customer and Oracle. Good example of this is banks. They managed to get some of the financial companies to move some workloads to AWS but to move Oracle workloads to something else is a whole different game. 1. https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2019/bye_bye_oracle_1.png https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2019/bye_bye_oracle...
- tanilama 7y ago
  It is. The effort is not really as other comments put out to build a Oracle competitors. Arguably for most companies, the open source alternatives are enough for them to be happy with. What Amazon shown here is the transition at scale is possible.
godson_drafty 7y ago
The developer carrying it out still using 2015 MBP
- taf2 7y ago
  Me too - still the best laptop
- hanniabu 7y ago
  My 2011 MBP is still my primary. This is the case for a lot of people because the newer versions just don't compare. On to of that you can't even upgrade the components in them since everything is integrated into the board.
  - droobles 7y ago
    samesies
  - alexvoda 7y ago
    In my opinion the best user friendly mac was the unibody early 2009 15" MacBook Pro. It was the last Mac with a removable battery. Plenty of technological improvements have been made since then but I still love that model.
  - dreamcompiler 7y ago
    Ditto. My 2011 MBP is a truck that just won't quit. Although I've replaced just about everything in it but the processor, the fact that I was able to do so makes me love the machine.
  - kstrauser 7y ago
    I only just now replaced mine (with a Mac Mini + an iPad Pro) because my graphics card died for the last time.
- dekhn 7y ago
  i miss my t42p
- zippergz 7y ago
TrueDuality 7y ago
Wow! Congratulations to the engineers. Oracle digs in deep. Bet that is a massive headache off a lot of people's plate.
victor106 7y ago
> The migration gave each internal team the freedom to choose the purpose-built AWS database service that best fit their needs, and also gave them better control over their budget and their cost model. Anyone know of a comprehensive resource that we could use to figure out which DB to use?
- zamalek 7y ago
  R&D and engineering.
- mooreds 7y ago
  Depends on what you mean by comprehensive. https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/ https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/ is a good place to start. After that I'd do some PoCs or talk to a consultant.
- jl6 7y ago
  Here’s an algorithm which I believe to be 95% accurate: If only a single user/device needs to access the data: use SQLite. In all other cases: use PostgreSQL.
  - dmix 7y ago
    At Amazon level you start needing specialized databases. For most other people Postgres is fine.
  - haggy 7y ago
    Not sure how much sarcasm is built into your statement but as a long time user & supporter of Postgres I have to disagree. Postgres is fantastic at many things but there are times when it's not the best choice. An example would be high-scale OLAP. I've tried to use PG for those cases but ingesting thousands+ of events per second into PG and then trying to perform rollups on them in an online capacity (near real-time availability) requires a TON of extra legwork to get it going and near continuous maintenance thereafter. Other purpose-built DB's for OLAP such as Druid, Clickhouse, etc are much better suited for this type of use-case. The main advantage these systems have over Postgres is their column-oriented nature vs. row-oriented of PG and other RDMS.
CydeWeys 7y ago
Migrating everything to the same externally-available cloud infrastructure is exactly the thing that Google needs to do, but has been failing at for going on a decade now. Yes, I'm bitter about it.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  It's not even on the radar for them I believe. Maybe ask again in another ten years.
- mattlondon 7y ago
  Is it not the case that it is actually the opposite? That GCP is running on the internally-available cloud infrastructure at Google? How would they turn that inside out? What would GCP actually run on if they ran GCP on GCP? Or do you mean run search/gmail/youtube on GCP? Isn't their internal infra basically kubernetes in all but name?
  - kenforthewin 7y ago
    I've heard that Google is bad at dog fooding their own cloud infrastructure and even that Borg is still dominant over Kubernetes in their internal infra but don't have any insider knowledge. If true this is one thing that Amazon is vastly superior than Google at.
    - brojonat 7y ago
      Yeah there was a post about that on HN that got a lot of attention a week or two ago. I think that letter/essay was written before google cloud platform was really a thing, would be interesting to know how things have changed since ~2006.
    - pradn 7y ago
      Internal teams are using some GCP services, but overall nearly all teams stick with Borg. Many key services like Search are not able to switch to GCP b/c performance degradation.
    - 7y ago
danesparza 7y ago
The very fact that they are dogfooding DynamoDB (with core features of their business) makes me want to take it more seriously and use it more. I also love that they didn't just replace Oracle with <insert competing RDBMS here> but instead thoughtfully pieced together a strategy based on what the data was going to be used for. Well done!
- mey 7y ago
  Have used DynamoDB a couple times, most recently for data processing. It is extremely expensive, for data storage and performance. Queries are limited and cumbersome to write. If you are looking at it, put a reasonable amount of test data in and play with it too see what costs look like compared to the performance you need from it.
  - onefuncman 7y ago
    Expensive compared to what? DynamoDB has the cheapest 4ms writes I can find... But yes, absolutely prototype and measure costs with real workloads
  - zwkrt 7y ago
    The DDB query language is one of the largest warts on the face of AWS. “Select From Where” is a solved problem!
  - StreamBright 7y ago
    I have the exact opposite experience. These are just anecdotal experiences. Without providing insight into the workload and your approach it is pretty meaningless.
samfriedman 7y ago
In my mind the true "hard part" would be in migrating business logic that lives in Oracle stored procedures (PL-SQL). Are there any tools that do a decent job in translating procs to non-Oracle dialects?
- mbell 7y ago
  I haven't used it in quite awhile but as I recall ora2pg[0] has some basic auto-conversion of PL-SQL. [0] http://ora2pg.darold.net/ http://ora2pg.darold.net/
- metadata 7y ago
  Yep, we built SQL Tran to do exactly that. https://www.spectralcore.com/sqltran https://www.spectralcore.com/sqltran. Finishing the rewrite right now which allows us to make changes much faster.
  - holykin 7y ago
    When is it out of Beta?
    - metadata 7y ago
      In a few months, it's not so far away. If you can share your database code (data is not important), we can make sure that our parsers and translation layer work with all the code constructs you use from day 1.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Are there any tools that do a decent job in translating procs to non-Oracle dialects? One of the main selling points of EnterpriseDB (built on top of and supporting development of Postgres) is a significant degree of Oracle compatibility, including PL/SQL, client interfaces, etc., so if you go that route you might not need much translation.
- poxrud 7y ago
  AWS has the AWS Schema Conversion tool that works pretty well.
sofaofthedamned 7y ago
Hate oracle personally. But when Amazon mention cost savings, I assume they're not at list price for normal aws customers like us?
- QuadrupleA 7y ago
  Article mentions that, yeah - cost savings are based on their already heavily discounted deal with Oracle.
  - remon 7y ago
    I think OP was asking if Amazon is calculating their savings based on the public AWS service pricing or their own cost for running on those AWS services (there's obviously a good chunk of margin on what it costs to run AWS and what the listed service prices are for those services).
  - dastbe 7y ago
    I think OP means Amazon’s discount on AWS. Many customers on AWS have contracts that guarantee discounted rates given sufficient volume. People have commented on hn about negotiating them, and you can see some examples from recent IPO filings. Amazon (the non-AWS parts) are yet another customer of AWS, and wherever possible you should expect them to operate like one. They even buy RIs!
    - sofaofthedamned 7y ago
      Thanks - yes that's exactly what I meant
    - QuadrupleA 7y ago
      Oops, thanks for clarifying.
  - alienallys 7y ago
    He was referring to RDS list price.
- 7y ago
tootie 7y ago
I wonder if anyone here has seen any net new adoption of Oracle DBs in the last few years? It was an absolute juggernaut 10-15 years ago and has rapidly tanked their reputation and spread their business across software, services and cloud with mixed results. Is it actually still growing or just milking their stodgy enterprise customers for more money?
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  I think that not very many existing customers of Oracle migrate off, but I have to think that they are no longer the default for new and growing businesses to move into. AWS seems to have become that, with Oracle not even the second-most likely option (that would probably be Google or Microsoft). Having said that, Oracle is probably the COBOL of databases, in that it will still be around (collecting good $$) from its existing customers for a long, long time.
- mxschumacher 7y ago
  I believe the business model is that it is near impossible to leave the ecosystem (this is also how SAP can still thrive). It takes a lot of money and expertise to make the migration happen. Few companies have scaling problems as pronounced as Amazon and as much of a vested interest in migrating to their own custom solutions.
  - NicoJuicy 7y ago
    SAP survives because it's good and handles a lot of business cases. I still hear implementations. I don't hear implementations of Oracle.
- bluejekyll 7y ago
  When they threaten you with lawsuits for using their software, and make their pricing completely opaque so you don’t really know what you owe (Comcast style), why would you knowingly choose that? Postgres is pretty darn good these days. I still love Java, but I won’t be surprised if that language becomes a business risk because of Oracle’s behavior in other spaces.
that_girl 7y ago
In other words, AWS used the stones to sustain the stones.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mxschumacher 7y ago
Will be interesting to see whether Amazon can make their insight into a service. Countless companies would be glad about a migration path from Oracle to AWS's solutions.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- fooblitzky 7y ago
  Maybe this? https://aws.amazon.com/dms/?nc2=h_ql_prod_mt_dbms https://aws.amazon.com/dms/?nc2=h_ql_prod_mt_dbms
yannis7 7y ago
wasn't Larry Ellison last year who was bragging that the whole of Amazon/AWS runs on Oracle?
- bluejekyll 7y ago
  He often uses Java as a means of making that statement somewhat true.
- yannis7 7y ago
  REF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzMYL901AQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzMYL901AQ
- atonse 7y ago
  That, and Oracle's legendary shitty business tactics, probably pushed AWS to make this a higher priority, and stick it in oracle's face with videos of oracle shutdown parties and blog posts. Take that, Larry Ellison.
- paulddraper 7y ago
  To be fair, AWS does run on Java.
  - kondro 7y ago
    Which is being migrated to AWS Corretto (if it hasn't been already).
growlist 7y ago
The video strikes me as an epic troll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yBP5gnnZi4&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yBP5gnnZi4&feature=youtu.be
- kgraves 7y ago
  > stopped oracle Now Amazon should do this to every company using them.
  - jhall1468 7y ago
    Why?
- jansan 7y ago
  I am pretty sure the emotions are real in this video.
  - growlist 7y ago
    Sorry I wasn't saying it was faked and I'm talking about the act of posting of the video, which I don't think it would be unreasonable to view as being deliberately provocative.
- jeffbarr 7y ago
  That was the actual shutdown. I was there, it was not rehearsed, and there were no retakes.
  - growlist 7y ago
    Sorry I wasn't saying I thought it was faked or something like that, in case that wasn't clear. I was saying that posting a video celebrating removing a vendor's software from your organisation could be seen as taunting them. Which - given that it's Oracle we are talking about - is pretty funny.
- fanf2 7y ago
  Who was the lucky bod who got to do the deed, and why did we only get to see their right arm?
TheKarateKid 7y ago
As someone who has never used or worked with Oracle DBs, can someone explain why migrating to another technology is so difficult? With all the database engines available, is there really not another one that can match Oracle without massive customizations?
- silon42 7y ago
  It probably starts with horrible things (not SQL compatible) like "" is equal to NULL...
- stickfigure 7y ago
  It really depends on how your applications were designed. If you "go deep" with Oracle - and if you've hired Oracle DBAs, you probably have - you probably have a lot of your business logic buried in a large body of stored procedures that aren't version controlled and rely on Oracle-specific behavior.
- ajkjk 7y ago
  Oh man. I used to work at Amazon at a time when this Oracle deprecation was starting up. It's utterly non-trivial. It's not really "switching relational DBs", it's "rebuilding all of the legacy systems to not use relational DBs". Their scale had long since left the realm where it was reasonable to run everything on massive monolithic DBs, but the technical debt hadn't been paid down -- so they just kept putting more money into bigger and bigger hardware and larger DBA teams to support them. For instance when I last worked the there each warehouse ran on a single massive Oracle DB. That isn't solved by swapping to another database; it was well beyond reasonable. I suspect that this article seems like a bit of self-promotion but it's actually intended as a giant middle-finger to Oracle.
  - philshem 7y ago
    > but it's actually intended a giant middle-finger to Oracle When they were all cheering, I actually felt bad for Oracle for a nanosecond.
    - 7y ago
koolba 7y ago
> Financial Ledger – This team moved 120 TB of data, reduced latency by 40%, cut costs by 70%, and cut overhead by the same 70%, all powered by DynamoDB. Does this mean they have a custom set of books running atop DynamoDB or is this specific to aggregate reporting and financial data warehousing?
- denimnerd42 7y ago
  Would love to know also. My guess given the volume of data is data warehousing.
mjw1007 7y ago
Amazon's leadership famously pushed hard in the early 2000s for all its systems to share data only via service interfaces ( https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 ). I wonder how much of the reason for that was actually a wish to avoid getting further locked in to Oracle (changing or removing a database that backs a single service is very much easier than changing a database that also acts as an integration point).
- discodave 7y ago
  If the goal of SOA was to reduce Oracle lock in then it utterly failed. After SOA practically every team had an Oracle db, so now they have to convince tens of thousands of engineers to migrate thousands of databases. Imagine what Oracle is going to try and charge Amazon per month for every remaining DB given how publicly hostile Amazon has been.
  - cloverich 7y ago
    I think you missed the point slightly. If the interfaces between these services are now Oracle agnostic, it makes migrating off Oracle (by mandate, if necessary) more feasible. More pointedly, I struggle to imagine a scenario where using Oracle of e.g. Postgres would be meaningful in any sense outside of the specifics of Oracle's out of the box integrations. If they aren't being used, why would anyone use Oracle at all?
  - dataminded 7y ago
    Amazon has enough money to not care. The marketing from this announcement will make them enough money to not care even less. The contracts almost certainly have pre-negotiated rate increases. You don’t put the vendor in a position to double your rates after you’ve adopted software.
vkaku 7y ago
Obviously, enough Amazon bots are giving me bad karma, but my point stands: No, Amazon is not a special snowflake because it did this. This was an expensive exercise in spite, took a long time and a lot of people - and everyone knows it. They could have done this far efficiently already if they wanted to scale out, but that company has too many conflicting internal priorities that they took a heck of a long time to move away to anything that scales. They never try to invent things and if not Oracle, they'd use some other vendor built software. That is the true reality of this company. So no, if you're thinking you're better than this company for moving away from vendor built software, you are mistaken. In the worst possible way.
- brixon 7y ago
  They did move to vendor built software. They moved to one that they could get better prices for, AWS. Everyone else will not likely get the deal that they received.
  - Slippery_John 7y ago
    > Everyone else will not likely get the deal that they received. True, but similarly few people would be able to swing the kind of discount they got at Oracle. I'd be really interested in seeing what those discounts worked out to overall.
- whoisjuan 7y ago
  "Amazon bots"... sure dude. Because all your opinions are popular by default. Otherwise is just "bots" downvoting you. Why people can't admit that their opinions can be unpopular sometimes. That's not a bad thing. Not all the things you say need to be popular to have meaning to yourself and others. It sucks to be downvoted but that's part of having a healthy discourse in HN.
  - vkaku 7y ago
    Okay, all is fair in a really healthy discussion. The reason I write what I write anyway is because I believe in them. Your point is taken and accepted. I've slammed Google, FB and some other tech companies on certain occasions BTW, and I absolutely never felt bad about it. Thanks!
irrational 7y ago
We've been working on migrating from Oracle to Postgres for a few years now. We are about 2 weeks from being finished. It is not for the faint of heart, but it is totally worth it. The documentation is much much better, performance is equivalent or better, the sql dialect is saner, etc. Other than moving the data itself (ora2pg was invaluable for this), rewriting the queries is what has taken the most amount of time. Some of our tips on differences between oracle and postgres sql: replace nvl with coalesce replace rownum <= 1 with LIMIT 1 replace listagg with string_agg replace recursive hierarchy (start with/connect by/prior) with recursive replace minus with except replace SYSDATE with CURRENT_TIMESTAMP replace trunc(sysdate) with CURRENT_DATE replace trunc(datelastupdated) with DATE(datelastupduted) or datelastupdated::date replace artificial date sentinels/fenceposts like to_date(’01 Jan 1900’) with '-infinity'::date remove dual table references (not needed in postgres) replace decode with case statements replace unique with distinct replace to_number with ::integer replace mod with % operator replace merge into with INSERT ... ON CONFLICT… DO UPDATE/NOTHING change the default of any table using sys_guid() as a default to gen_random_uuid() oracle pivot and unpivot do not work in postgres - use unnest ORDER BY NLSSORT(english, 'NLS_SORT=generic_m') becomes ORDER BY gin(insensitive_query(english) gin_trgm_ops) Oracle: uses IS NULL to check for empty string; in postgres, empty string and null are different If a varchar/text column has a unique index a check needs to be made to make sure empty strings are changed to nulls before adding or updating the column. PostgreSQL requires a sub-SELECT surrounded by parentheses, and an alias must be provided for it. - SELECT * FROM ( ) A any functions in the order by clause must be moved to the select statement (e.g. order by lower(column_name)) Any sort of numeric/integer/bigint/etc. inside of a IN statement must not be a string (including 'null' - don't bother trying to use null="" it won't work). Concatenating a NULL with a NOT NULL will result in a NULL. Pay attention to any left joins. If a column from a left join is used in a where or select clause it might be null. For sequences, instead of .nextval use nextval('')
- michannne 7y ago
  Using SQL Server exclusively has given me a Never-Oracle mindset. Some of these differences sound insane. and > any functions in the order by clause must be moved to the select statement (e.g. order by lower(column_name)) I'd pull the hair outta my head
darksaints 7y ago
It should be noted that the email that Steve Yegge made famous was: 1) The birth of the service oriented architecture as a standard at Amazon 2) Took place long before AWS was used by Amazon's commercial business, and most software systems were monolithic, requiring mainframe-like dedicated hardware. 3) Was inspired due to the epic spaghetti monster known as FC Software, whose entire non-architecture revolved around a massive Oracle database. When Amazon hit the limits of scaling the Oracle databases with beefier hardware, they realized what a clusterfuck they had created. There were literally hundreds of applications, doing different things, but all connected to the oracle database. The oracle database functioned as a database, but also as a high throughput queue, as well as a message passing platform. At high loads, different applications were hitting the same rows so frequently that the transaction errors alone could bring down an entire fulfillment center. And it should also be noted that it was the same FC Systems (the inspiration for the move towards SOA) that took 12 years to finally get rid of Oracle. Moral of the story: you need competent software architects, and at the very least, a scalability plan. Also, fuck Oracle.
- zzzcpan 7y ago
  > The oracle database functioned as a database, but also as a high throughput queue, as well as a message passing platform. At high loads, different applications were hitting the same rows so frequently that the transaction errors alone could bring down an entire fulfillment center. Isn't that how everyone uses Oracle? I've seen exactly the same complains from developers at banks. Although building software around big featureful RDBMSs in general encourages poor architectures and messy software.
  - uxp 7y ago
    I've seen the same architecture implemented in MSSQL and MySQL. It's pretty easy to paint yourself into a corner where your one database is doing all sorts of stupid things because you never sat down and identified the problem space in the larger context and moved to a wider configuration instead of simply using a table with short-lived rows as a queue. It's the same arguments about nails and hammers.
- 7y ago
exabrial 7y ago
Oracle should have been doing everything to keep them as a customer and push their databases through cloud offerings. They already push their software through resellers, sort of the same thing, just automatic
- WomanCanCode 7y ago
  Do you know what is happening to their cloud offering?
  - exabrial 7y ago
    From what I understand it's mainly being thrown at governments. Why do you ask?
throwaway981211 7y ago
What that article doesn’t capture is how many engineers absolutely burned out working against unreasonable deadlines and cut throat managers.
latchkey 7y ago
They beat their own estimates: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/amazon-plans-to-move-off-oracle-software-by-early-2020.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/amazon-plans-to-move-off-ora...
WomanCanCode 7y ago
Any reason why Larry Ellison is still running the company?
arrty88 7y ago
How much did the actual migration effort cost them?
decoyworker 7y ago
The sooner that IBM and Oracle die the better.
dade_ 7y ago
The business case to stop managing Oracle contracts and licencing is probably pretty good, especially when factoring in the sick days and stress leave of employees dealing with their infuriating people, processes and tools.
the_duke 7y ago
The video feels like a big middle finger to Oracle. "stop oracle", and the URL https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/freedom https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/freedom. Not that I'm complaining, Oracle deserves all the hate they get for their business practices. But associating AWS with "breaking free" is extremely ironic. It's just as much of a source for vendor lock in as Oracle. If you are not extremely careful/dedicated with your system design, you are never moving off of AWS ever again, or only with a huge engineering effort that almost no-one will swallow. AWS also knows this very well: discounts are harder to come by if they can tell you are totally locked in to their infrastructure. Combine that with the fact that AWS loves to fork OS projects and build products out of them, without contributing back upstream. AWS is a terrific platform in many ways, but it is certainly not something that will lead to freedom of choice.
- mzkply 7y ago
  I guess the only freedom is that of multi-year license contracts.
- jpalomaki 7y ago
  This is kind of reply to Larry Ellison's comments [1] about how Amazon can't run their business on their own databases. [1] https://youtu.be/xrzMYL901AQ?t=50 https://youtu.be/xrzMYL901AQ?t=50
  - perspective1 7y ago
    "They have been unable to migrate to AWS <pause> because it's not good enough." No, Larry, it's because database migration is hard and risky.
  - throwaway981211 7y ago
    I work at Amazon. Ellisons assessment is trash meant to fool maybe Wall Street analysts, but as an engineer, his claims are laughable. In reality, database migrations are hard. Removing that factor entirely for a moment, engineers don’t want to work on lift and shift projects. They come to Amazon to build interesting shit. Now imagine database migrations are easy and your engineers love this work - well, now it turns out you’ve basically stopped real innovation in your organizations to do this operational work for cost savings. I could go on... there are so many factors why it took Amazon a while to get off Oracle. Ellison is a heaping pile of dog shit fraudster. Before you dismiss me as being biased, look at my post history. I’m critical enough of Amazon.
tyingq 7y ago
Is "Amazon's Consumer Area" deliberately specific? That is, are they still using Oracle somewhere else? (Despite 75 petabytes being significant) Edit: I did see "some third-party applications are tightly bound to Oracle and were not migrated". Curious if that's all that is left, globally, at AMZN.
- sillypuddy 7y ago
  There are Oracle AWS offerings - https://aws.amazon.com/oracle/ https://aws.amazon.com/oracle/
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Good example of what I'm asking for. Does AMZN use any Oracle RDS, or other Oracle offerings, aside from what they just retired?
edf13 7y ago
Amazon Polly works well! First time I’ve used it ~ hit play and let it read the article whilst I did a few other things!
hackernewsboy 7y ago
is this purpose built database based on mysql?
hackernewsboy 7y ago
is this purpose built database based on mysql or postgresql?
IronWolve 7y ago
Oracle goes after customers with 3rd party companies, if you use oracle expect calls for audits and more licenses. You download virtualbox extension at work? Thats a fee per user. Use an Oracle VM in a vmware cluster? They want paid for all cores in your environment now. Seriously, Oracle goes after their customers like criminals. I refuse their calls at work, they really are just looking for something to make you pay.
- toyg 7y ago
  > Oracle goes after customers with 3rd party companies That's going to end soon - the partner ecosystem has been royally shafted by Oracle's big "cloud push", people are moving away from a vendor who simply sold them down the river; and in their Brave New Cloud World, there is no need for license resellers and auditors. Ironically, that might end up improving Oracle's reputation - they'll just be seen like Google, where everything is automated and support goes from mediocre to nonexistent.
- generatorguy 7y ago
  I tried to license virtualbox extensions and they told me to call back when I wanted at least 500 licenses.
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company whose customer relations strategy seems to actively involve litigating them as a default assumption. Amazon is considered a paragon of IT, so their expulsion of Oracle is a useful tool at the CIO/CTO level of "nobody ever got fired for IBM" level of reasoning. Unfortunately, AWS is becoming the new IBM in that reasoning. Great that it took ten years to reach that level of agreement, now hybrid cloud needs to take over the grey haired CIO / CTO level. Long live Postgresql!
- outworlder 7y ago
  > whose customer relations strategy seems to actively involve litigating them as a default assumption They are not nice to their partners either.
- Wistar 7y ago
  Back in the early days of Oxygen Media I remember the then CTO saying that Oracle's pricing model appeared to him to be based on turning the customer upside down to empty all of the money from their pockets.
  - baq 7y ago
    And the final invoice would be for $30k more...
- gopalv 7y ago
  > Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company Amazon and Oracle couldn't be more different in this point of view. Amazon's predatory instincts are pointed inwards and downwards, towards employees and vendors, while being mostly great towards the customer. Everything from their warehouse workers with timers, the crying software engineers and all other things I hear about them are about running an internally facing extraction economy. The squeeze is being put on those who draw a paycheck (or at least, a profit) from Amazon, while the consumers see instant access servers on EC2, Amazon Go for lunch breaks in a city or One hour shipping of diapers. In comparison, Oracle seems to be going after those who pay them already.
LrnByTeach 7y ago
Here is the meat of the Report: >We migrated 75 petabytes of internal data stored in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases to multiple AWS database services including Amazon DynamoDB,Aurora, RDS, and Redshift. >We kept careful track of the costs and the performance, and realized the following results: >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%.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  How did they negotiate a discount when they weren’t yet able to move off the database? ‘Give us a discount or...’ or what?
  - TooCleverByHalf 7y ago
    I'd guess it goes something like, "We have 75 petabytes of data to move over and would like to use your services but are concerned about costs. What kind of prices can you give us?".
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      But they’ve got no choice - there’s no ‘or else’ until they’re able to move off. What stopped Oracle charging them a billion dollars a CPU for the last few years since they’ve already announced they were moving off?
      - Yeroc 7y ago
        On the other hand if Oracle started charging more that would allow Amazon to justify spending more on internal investment to speed up the migration.
      - erikpukinskis 7y ago
iRobbery 7y ago
"This team moved 40 TB of data with just one hour of downtime, and realized the same or better performance at half the cost, powered by Amazon Aurora." Would have loved to have read some technical details on how 40 Tbyte was transferred in an hour, even migrated.
- remus 7y ago
  Presumably they didn't go for a 'turn it off, do the transfer, turn it on again' strategy. I'd guess they transferred the bulk of the data beforehand then applied incremental updates until the databases matched then turned off the old db.
- Havoc 7y ago
  >Would have loved to have read some technical details on how 40 Tbyte was transferred in an hour, even migrated. Perhaps I'm missing something but that doesn't seem hard considering: 1) It's only like 3x high end consumer level 16TB HDDs 2) This is Amazon...they have AWS - really fat pipes and endless horsepower on demand
  - kondro 7y ago
    Have you tried transferring 40TB from 3x spinning disk HDD… let alone an actively running DB infrastructure? The maximum sustained transfer rate of a 16TB Seagate Exos X16 is 261MB/s. That would take 17 hours to transfer at full speed. Not that the data storage would look like that, but even at 100Gbps networking operating at 80% (about what you'd achieve realistically) it would take 70 minutes to transfer 40TB at full wire speeds. But we're not talking about full-wire speeds. We're talking about exporting from an Oracle DB and importing to an entirely different DB. The file transfer task isn't the hard bit, it's the actual data migration along the way. That's a massive undertaking and I'm surprised any of the migration tasks were able to complete with such a small amount of downtime.
denimnerd42 7y ago
We have a huge database problem at my company (department). There are only 4 databases for 200 developers. I find this extremely cumbersome to develop on. Ideally there would be at least 1 DB per developer plus some shared environments. What do others do?
choiway 7y ago
Larry might need to sell his island.
senderista 7y ago
Notice they don't say that AWS has completely migrated off Oracle. There was plenty of Oracle there 5 years ago, including at the core of some of the most popular services. (There was also a significant migration effort underway then as well, mostly to DynamoDB.)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jpalomaki 7y ago
Oracle would have the set of tools for providing a interesting opinionated cloud/onprem platform for microservices architecture. Something along the lines of JavaEE, deployed on something derived from WebLogic, bound together with reliable messaging bus (Tuxedo), backed by Oracle database.
suyash 7y ago
Most of what Amazon is talking about is the Oracle Old database product, check out Oracle's latest offering that is powered by AI - Autonomous Databases: https://www.oracle.com/database/autonomous-database.html https://www.oracle.com/database/autonomous-database.html
orf 7y ago
> Across the 48 hours of Prime Day, these sources made 7.11 trillion calls to the DynamoDB API, peaking at 45.4 million requests per second. > The team added an additional 63 petabytes of storage ahead of Prime Day; the resulting fleet handled 2.1 trillion requests per day and transferred 185 petabytes of data per day. > Prime Day 2019 also relied on a massive, diverse collection of EC2 instances. The internal scaling metric for these instances is known as a server equivalent; Prime Day started off with 372K server equivalents and scaled up to 426K at peak. Woah. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-prime-day-2019-powered-by-aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-prime-day-2019-power...
- apocalyptic0n3 7y ago
  The largest scale I've ever needed to work at was 2 EC2 instances (really just 1 for incoming and 1 for background SQS job handling). The numbers in that post are simply staggering to me.
nojvek 7y ago
This is Jeff Bezos calling out Larry Ellison on his bullshit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzMYL901AQ&feature=youtu.be&t=50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzMYL901AQ&feature=youtu.be...
jnaina 7y ago
Here's the key difference between Oracle and AWS: - Oracle will schedule periodic audits on their customers and legally threaten them for inadvertent licensing oversights - AWS makes it a mandatory policy that all their sales folks periodically sit with their customers to help optimise and reduce their ongoing AWS Cloud costs If you are making a case that Oracle == AWS, you don't know what you are talking about. Yes, I have dealt with both these companies up close.
- philliphaydon 7y ago
  > AWS makes it a mandatory policy that all their sales folks periodically sit with their customers to help optimise and reduce their ongoing AWS Cloud costs Their KPIs are to reduce costs for customers but also to increase usage of AWS services to make more money. The KPIs seem to contradict each other.
  - jon-wood 7y ago
    I've been in some of these meetings, and strangely the KPIs don't actually contradict themselves. Most of the recommendations we were given were around switching workload from one way of running things to a service which would be a better fit, and because we'd be using it as intended ended up being cheaper than the original implementation.
  - joncrane 7y ago
    The goal is to grow with the customer. AWS doesn't mind having a smaller piece of the pie because the pie is growing.
fierarul 7y ago
There was recently a similar story about Amazon Fulfillment turning off the final Oracle Database: https://twitter.com/jdarrow/status/1111629087947132928 https://twitter.com/jdarrow/status/1111629087947132928 I wasn't aware they are doing this PR pieces on a department by department basis. Are there any more remaining Amazon departments still doing this process?
matheusmoreira 7y ago
This is a good thing, given this description of the Oracle database: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
It took Amazon.com, a large company with tons of incentives and a strong mandate from the top floors, 7-8 years (at least!) to get out of Oracle. I can easily imagine how "normal" companies will not have such an easy time doing so. I guess we're going to have Oracle around for a long time.
truth_seeker 7y ago
Price is the only main reason I see which drive this migration. About Oracle Database (not Oracle company), I am very much in agreement that (PL)SQL can be used as one language to take care of Relational Algebra, Row oriented, Column oriented, Document oriented and also Blockchain oriented disk persistent tables with local node partitioning and distributed sharding, Graph traversals queries using recursive CTEs, auto tuning of indexes, streaming materialized views, distributed topic/queues. Oh by the way with little effort you can accomplish almost all what Oracle does with PostgreSQL and its community extensions.

927 points by jeffbarr 7y ago

jedieaston 7y ago

Is this not a case study that anyone can leave Oracle now, if an Amazon scale install can?

vkaku 7y ago
It shows that a big company like Amazon, hiring thousands of SDEs still needed other vendors software than their own, because of all that time they spent in hiring and firing people and obsessing over their customers needs. sarcasm
- vkaku 7y ago
  Also, MySQL is technically, an Oracle database (after Sun got bought out). Now they should write some migrations to turn all of that off. sarcasm intensifies
  - deweller 7y ago
    I expect the internal teams use Amazon Aurora instead of MySQL. Aurora is compatible with MySQL but is not owned by Oracle.
    - vkaku 7y ago
      Yeah but the client interfaces are all MySQL. Oracle should buy off PostgreSQL too. And then it should start charging only Amazon for using these interfaces. moar sarcasm.
  - gerdesj 7y ago
    MariaDB - https://mariadb.org/about/ https://mariadb.org/about/
    - vkaku 7y ago
      There was also MaxDB, and a few other that Monty built. There's also Percona, WebscaleSQL and a few other forks. Amazon have been using MySQL even before all these forks happened. And not only that, if Oracle decided to pursue a lawsuit, or if MariaDB, Percona, Elasticsearch or EnterpriseDB did, Amazon will have to cough up. This is not really a thing that Amazon should be bragging about, because it makes no real sense! They still run a lot of software they did not write.
      - jhall1468 7y ago
        Note: Amazon employee, but opinions are mine. Amazon did not replace Oracle with MySQL. You seems to talk a lot given your knowledge of how Amazon operates internally and how licensing works is... blatantly false. All of those DB's that could "pursue" a lawsuit are built on open source licenses which Amazon is not violating. But the most important point here: The idea that you have to write a database to be happy to be off Oracle is insane. Amazon moved to an alternative that doesn't have a deep license designed to financially screw their clients as much as possible. That's a win.
        vkaku 7y ago
        1. When did I say that Amazon replaced Oracle with MySQL? I just said that MySQL is an Oracle database. 2. Open Source licenses that Amazon is not violating - a 3rdparty lawyer would be able to ascertain better about the extent of legality on Amazon's changes and its contribution back to open source software than you and I do. 3. Ex-Amazon employee here. My comments are purely based on my observation - and purely my opinions. Why can't I talk a lot?
        jhall1468 7y ago
        1. I assumed it was implied. Why else bring it up? 2. If there was a means to sue Amazon for hosting databases, Oracle would have already done it a LONG time ago with MySQL. The burden is on you to prove your claim. 3. You are free to talk as much as you want, just expect push back when you aren't right, a lot. ;)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- StreamBright 7y ago
  No, it means that Amazon reached the point of considering other solutions than Oracle (I bet partially because of cost) at the time when this project started to move their database workloads that at the time were residing on Oracle to something else. Amazon uses many software vendors, they by no mean suffer from the NIH (not invented here) plague.
lawnchair_larry 7y ago
Or is it a case study that you need the resources of Amazon to pull off migrating from Oracle?
mmsimanga 7y ago
> some third-party applications are tightly bound to Oracle and were not migrated Oracle's strategy of buying companies like PeopleSoft is paying off.
AshwinDurairaj 7y ago
SAP and Salesforce would love to, but haven't achieved Oracle-free status to the joy of Larry.
- notzuck 7y ago
  S4 doesn't use Oracle, Commerce doesn't use Oracle. Some of the acquisitions still do because nobody wanted to free up cash.
mumblemumble 7y ago
It is not. Amazon accomplished the task by building their own Oracle replacement. You have to be approximately as large as Amazon for that to be a realistic option. If you'd like to use the alternatives that Amazon built, you can, of course, migrate to Amazon Web Services. Though, if you dislike the vendor lock-in you're experiencing with Oracle, and are considering Amazon as a good place to flee to, you possibly haven't been paying attention. With Oracle, you're just renting the software. With Amazon, you're renting both the software and the hardware, and renting the hardware is a precondition of being able to continue using the software, AND they charge you a fee to move your data off of their hardware. It's one of the most well-engineered enterprise vendor lock-in traps the industry has ever seen.
- cwyers 7y ago
  Most places likely aren't using Oracle at Amazon's scale, either. I suspect that one of MySQL, Postgres or Microsoft SQL Server can fill in for Oracle if you have access to the source code and can make changes yourself. (If you've bought software that is Oracle-only, then it's not an option -- but it wasn't an option for Amazon, either). I suspect that in a lot of cases, this will pay for itself, but it might take 10 years to do so.
  - sovnade 7y ago
    Depending on the size of your install, there are companies that are very good at converting over something like Oracle to Postgres for probably much less than you'd expect. With the price of oracle licensing, your break-even could be in a year or two.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    >Microsoft SQL Server Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
    - mumblemumble 7y ago
      MSSQL's really not too bad. Yes, it's a commercial offering, but there's nothing inherently evil about charging money for software, and you do get what you pay for. I've worked in both MSSQL shops and PostgreSQL shops, and, while I wasn't in charge of the budget, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that, once you factor paying your programmers and DBAs for their time into the equation, the MSSQL shop ended up having lower overall costs associated with its choice of DBMS.
ceejayoz 7y ago
Just because Bill Gates has the resources to buy a fleet of 747s doesn't mean I can.
StreamBright 7y ago
I think the approach can be applied to many companies. I have seen some companies turning every single data storing problem into an Oracle problem. Amazon turned many of the problems into ones that are easier to solve. Using 6 different technologies[1]. I am sure not all applies to all departments but it is a better approach to do this at the scale they got. For small companies this really does not matter. If your hot data fits a single node disk cache you obviously won't benefit from using a horizontally scalable database but Oracle's customers are often in the higher end of the scale spectrum. The question is how can Amazon compete with Oracle where the relationship is there for decades between a customer and Oracle. Good example of this is banks. They managed to get some of the financial companies to move some workloads to AWS but to move Oracle workloads to something else is a whole different game. 1. https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2019/bye_bye_oracle_1.png https://media.amazonwebservices.com/blog/2019/bye_bye_oracle...
tanilama 7y ago
It is. The effort is not really as other comments put out to build a Oracle competitors. Arguably for most companies, the open source alternatives are enough for them to be happy with. What Amazon shown here is the transition at scale is possible.

godson_drafty 7y ago

The developer carrying it out still using 2015 MBP

taf2 7y ago
Me too - still the best laptop
hanniabu 7y ago
My 2011 MBP is still my primary. This is the case for a lot of people because the newer versions just don't compare. On to of that you can't even upgrade the components in them since everything is integrated into the board.
- droobles 7y ago
  samesies
- alexvoda 7y ago
  In my opinion the best user friendly mac was the unibody early 2009 15" MacBook Pro. It was the last Mac with a removable battery. Plenty of technological improvements have been made since then but I still love that model.
- dreamcompiler 7y ago
  Ditto. My 2011 MBP is a truck that just won't quit. Although I've replaced just about everything in it but the processor, the fact that I was able to do so makes me love the machine.
- kstrauser 7y ago
  I only just now replaced mine (with a Mac Mini + an iPad Pro) because my graphics card died for the last time.
dekhn 7y ago
i miss my t42p
zippergz 7y ago

TrueDuality 7y ago

Wow! Congratulations to the engineers. Oracle digs in deep. Bet that is a massive headache off a lot of people's plate.

victor106 7y ago

> The migration gave each internal team the freedom to choose the purpose-built AWS database service that best fit their needs, and also gave them better control over their budget and their cost model. Anyone know of a comprehensive resource that we could use to figure out which DB to use?

zamalek 7y ago
R&D and engineering.
mooreds 7y ago
Depends on what you mean by comprehensive. https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/ https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/ is a good place to start. After that I'd do some PoCs or talk to a consultant.
jl6 7y ago
Here’s an algorithm which I believe to be 95% accurate: If only a single user/device needs to access the data: use SQLite. In all other cases: use PostgreSQL.
- dmix 7y ago
  At Amazon level you start needing specialized databases. For most other people Postgres is fine.
- haggy 7y ago
  Not sure how much sarcasm is built into your statement but as a long time user & supporter of Postgres I have to disagree. Postgres is fantastic at many things but there are times when it's not the best choice. An example would be high-scale OLAP. I've tried to use PG for those cases but ingesting thousands+ of events per second into PG and then trying to perform rollups on them in an online capacity (near real-time availability) requires a TON of extra legwork to get it going and near continuous maintenance thereafter. Other purpose-built DB's for OLAP such as Druid, Clickhouse, etc are much better suited for this type of use-case. The main advantage these systems have over Postgres is their column-oriented nature vs. row-oriented of PG and other RDMS.

CydeWeys 7y ago

Migrating everything to the same externally-available cloud infrastructure is exactly the thing that Google needs to do, but has been failing at for going on a decade now. Yes, I'm bitter about it.

zzzcpan 7y ago
It's not even on the radar for them I believe. Maybe ask again in another ten years.
mattlondon 7y ago
Is it not the case that it is actually the opposite? That GCP is running on the internally-available cloud infrastructure at Google? How would they turn that inside out? What would GCP actually run on if they ran GCP on GCP? Or do you mean run search/gmail/youtube on GCP? Isn't their internal infra basically kubernetes in all but name?
- kenforthewin 7y ago
  I've heard that Google is bad at dog fooding their own cloud infrastructure and even that Borg is still dominant over Kubernetes in their internal infra but don't have any insider knowledge. If true this is one thing that Amazon is vastly superior than Google at.
  - brojonat 7y ago
    Yeah there was a post about that on HN that got a lot of attention a week or two ago. I think that letter/essay was written before google cloud platform was really a thing, would be interesting to know how things have changed since ~2006.
  - pradn 7y ago
    Internal teams are using some GCP services, but overall nearly all teams stick with Borg. Many key services like Search are not able to switch to GCP b/c performance degradation.
  - 7y ago

danesparza 7y ago

The very fact that they are dogfooding DynamoDB (with core features of their business) makes me want to take it more seriously and use it more. I also love that they didn't just replace Oracle with <insert competing RDBMS here> but instead thoughtfully pieced together a strategy based on what the data was going to be used for. Well done!

mey 7y ago
Have used DynamoDB a couple times, most recently for data processing. It is extremely expensive, for data storage and performance. Queries are limited and cumbersome to write. If you are looking at it, put a reasonable amount of test data in and play with it too see what costs look like compared to the performance you need from it.
- onefuncman 7y ago
  Expensive compared to what? DynamoDB has the cheapest 4ms writes I can find... But yes, absolutely prototype and measure costs with real workloads
- zwkrt 7y ago
  The DDB query language is one of the largest warts on the face of AWS. “Select From Where” is a solved problem!
- StreamBright 7y ago
  I have the exact opposite experience. These are just anecdotal experiences. Without providing insight into the workload and your approach it is pretty meaningless.

samfriedman 7y ago

In my mind the true "hard part" would be in migrating business logic that lives in Oracle stored procedures (PL-SQL). Are there any tools that do a decent job in translating procs to non-Oracle dialects?

mbell 7y ago
I haven't used it in quite awhile but as I recall ora2pg[0] has some basic auto-conversion of PL-SQL. [0] http://ora2pg.darold.net/ http://ora2pg.darold.net/
metadata 7y ago
Yep, we built SQL Tran to do exactly that. https://www.spectralcore.com/sqltran https://www.spectralcore.com/sqltran. Finishing the rewrite right now which allows us to make changes much faster.
- holykin 7y ago
  When is it out of Beta?
  - metadata 7y ago
    In a few months, it's not so far away. If you can share your database code (data is not important), we can make sure that our parsers and translation layer work with all the code constructs you use from day 1.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> Are there any tools that do a decent job in translating procs to non-Oracle dialects? One of the main selling points of EnterpriseDB (built on top of and supporting development of Postgres) is a significant degree of Oracle compatibility, including PL/SQL, client interfaces, etc., so if you go that route you might not need much translation.
poxrud 7y ago
AWS has the AWS Schema Conversion tool that works pretty well.

sofaofthedamned 7y ago

Hate oracle personally. But when Amazon mention cost savings, I assume they're not at list price for normal aws customers like us?

QuadrupleA 7y ago
Article mentions that, yeah - cost savings are based on their already heavily discounted deal with Oracle.
- remon 7y ago
  I think OP was asking if Amazon is calculating their savings based on the public AWS service pricing or their own cost for running on those AWS services (there's obviously a good chunk of margin on what it costs to run AWS and what the listed service prices are for those services).
- dastbe 7y ago
  I think OP means Amazon’s discount on AWS. Many customers on AWS have contracts that guarantee discounted rates given sufficient volume. People have commented on hn about negotiating them, and you can see some examples from recent IPO filings. Amazon (the non-AWS parts) are yet another customer of AWS, and wherever possible you should expect them to operate like one. They even buy RIs!
  - sofaofthedamned 7y ago
    Thanks - yes that's exactly what I meant
  - QuadrupleA 7y ago
    Oops, thanks for clarifying.
- alienallys 7y ago
  He was referring to RDS list price.
7y ago

tootie 7y ago

I wonder if anyone here has seen any net new adoption of Oracle DBs in the last few years? It was an absolute juggernaut 10-15 years ago and has rapidly tanked their reputation and spread their business across software, services and cloud with mixed results. Is it actually still growing or just milking their stodgy enterprise customers for more money?

rossdavidh 7y ago
I think that not very many existing customers of Oracle migrate off, but I have to think that they are no longer the default for new and growing businesses to move into. AWS seems to have become that, with Oracle not even the second-most likely option (that would probably be Google or Microsoft). Having said that, Oracle is probably the COBOL of databases, in that it will still be around (collecting good $$) from its existing customers for a long, long time.
mxschumacher 7y ago
I believe the business model is that it is near impossible to leave the ecosystem (this is also how SAP can still thrive). It takes a lot of money and expertise to make the migration happen. Few companies have scaling problems as pronounced as Amazon and as much of a vested interest in migrating to their own custom solutions.
- NicoJuicy 7y ago
  SAP survives because it's good and handles a lot of business cases. I still hear implementations. I don't hear implementations of Oracle.
bluejekyll 7y ago
When they threaten you with lawsuits for using their software, and make their pricing completely opaque so you don’t really know what you owe (Comcast style), why would you knowingly choose that? Postgres is pretty darn good these days. I still love Java, but I won’t be surprised if that language becomes a business risk because of Oracle’s behavior in other spaces.

that_girl 7y ago

In other words, AWS used the stones to sustain the stones.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mxschumacher 7y ago

Will be interesting to see whether Amazon can make their insight into a service. Countless companies would be glad about a migration path from Oracle to AWS's solutions.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
fooblitzky 7y ago
Maybe this? https://aws.amazon.com/dms/?nc2=h_ql_prod_mt_dbms https://aws.amazon.com/dms/?nc2=h_ql_prod_mt_dbms

yannis7 7y ago

wasn't Larry Ellison last year who was bragging that the whole of Amazon/AWS runs on Oracle?

bluejekyll 7y ago
He often uses Java as a means of making that statement somewhat true.
yannis7 7y ago
REF: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzMYL901AQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzMYL901AQ
atonse 7y ago
That, and Oracle's legendary shitty business tactics, probably pushed AWS to make this a higher priority, and stick it in oracle's face with videos of oracle shutdown parties and blog posts. Take that, Larry Ellison.
paulddraper 7y ago
To be fair, AWS does run on Java.
- kondro 7y ago
  Which is being migrated to AWS Corretto (if it hasn't been already).

growlist 7y ago

The video strikes me as an epic troll: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yBP5gnnZi4&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yBP5gnnZi4&feature=youtu.be

kgraves 7y ago
> stopped oracle Now Amazon should do this to every company using them.
- jhall1468 7y ago
  Why?
jansan 7y ago
I am pretty sure the emotions are real in this video.
- growlist 7y ago
  Sorry I wasn't saying it was faked and I'm talking about the act of posting of the video, which I don't think it would be unreasonable to view as being deliberately provocative.
jeffbarr 7y ago
That was the actual shutdown. I was there, it was not rehearsed, and there were no retakes.
- growlist 7y ago
  Sorry I wasn't saying I thought it was faked or something like that, in case that wasn't clear. I was saying that posting a video celebrating removing a vendor's software from your organisation could be seen as taunting them. Which - given that it's Oracle we are talking about - is pretty funny.
fanf2 7y ago
Who was the lucky bod who got to do the deed, and why did we only get to see their right arm?

TheKarateKid 7y ago

As someone who has never used or worked with Oracle DBs, can someone explain why migrating to another technology is so difficult? With all the database engines available, is there really not another one that can match Oracle without massive customizations?

silon42 7y ago
It probably starts with horrible things (not SQL compatible) like "" is equal to NULL...
stickfigure 7y ago
It really depends on how your applications were designed. If you "go deep" with Oracle - and if you've hired Oracle DBAs, you probably have - you probably have a lot of your business logic buried in a large body of stored procedures that aren't version controlled and rely on Oracle-specific behavior.
ajkjk 7y ago
Oh man. I used to work at Amazon at a time when this Oracle deprecation was starting up. It's utterly non-trivial. It's not really "switching relational DBs", it's "rebuilding all of the legacy systems to not use relational DBs". Their scale had long since left the realm where it was reasonable to run everything on massive monolithic DBs, but the technical debt hadn't been paid down -- so they just kept putting more money into bigger and bigger hardware and larger DBA teams to support them. For instance when I last worked the there each warehouse ran on a single massive Oracle DB. That isn't solved by swapping to another database; it was well beyond reasonable. I suspect that this article seems like a bit of self-promotion but it's actually intended as a giant middle-finger to Oracle.
- philshem 7y ago
  > but it's actually intended a giant middle-finger to Oracle When they were all cheering, I actually felt bad for Oracle for a nanosecond.
  - 7y ago

koolba 7y ago

> Financial Ledger – This team moved 120 TB of data, reduced latency by 40%, cut costs by 70%, and cut overhead by the same 70%, all powered by DynamoDB. Does this mean they have a custom set of books running atop DynamoDB or is this specific to aggregate reporting and financial data warehousing?

denimnerd42 7y ago
Would love to know also. My guess given the volume of data is data warehousing.

mjw1007 7y ago

Amazon's leadership famously pushed hard in the early 2000s for all its systems to share data only via service interfaces ( https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 ). I wonder how much of the reason for that was actually a wish to avoid getting further locked in to Oracle (changing or removing a database that backs a single service is very much easier than changing a database that also acts as an integration point).

discodave 7y ago
If the goal of SOA was to reduce Oracle lock in then it utterly failed. After SOA practically every team had an Oracle db, so now they have to convince tens of thousands of engineers to migrate thousands of databases. Imagine what Oracle is going to try and charge Amazon per month for every remaining DB given how publicly hostile Amazon has been.
- cloverich 7y ago
  I think you missed the point slightly. If the interfaces between these services are now Oracle agnostic, it makes migrating off Oracle (by mandate, if necessary) more feasible. More pointedly, I struggle to imagine a scenario where using Oracle of e.g. Postgres would be meaningful in any sense outside of the specifics of Oracle's out of the box integrations. If they aren't being used, why would anyone use Oracle at all?
- dataminded 7y ago
  Amazon has enough money to not care. The marketing from this announcement will make them enough money to not care even less. The contracts almost certainly have pre-negotiated rate increases. You don’t put the vendor in a position to double your rates after you’ve adopted software.

vkaku 7y ago

Obviously, enough Amazon bots are giving me bad karma, but my point stands: No, Amazon is not a special snowflake because it did this. This was an expensive exercise in spite, took a long time and a lot of people - and everyone knows it. They could have done this far efficiently already if they wanted to scale out, but that company has too many conflicting internal priorities that they took a heck of a long time to move away to anything that scales. They never try to invent things and if not Oracle, they'd use some other vendor built software. That is the true reality of this company. So no, if you're thinking you're better than this company for moving away from vendor built software, you are mistaken. In the worst possible way.

brixon 7y ago
They did move to vendor built software. They moved to one that they could get better prices for, AWS. Everyone else will not likely get the deal that they received.
- Slippery_John 7y ago
  > Everyone else will not likely get the deal that they received. True, but similarly few people would be able to swing the kind of discount they got at Oracle. I'd be really interested in seeing what those discounts worked out to overall.
whoisjuan 7y ago
"Amazon bots"... sure dude. Because all your opinions are popular by default. Otherwise is just "bots" downvoting you. Why people can't admit that their opinions can be unpopular sometimes. That's not a bad thing. Not all the things you say need to be popular to have meaning to yourself and others. It sucks to be downvoted but that's part of having a healthy discourse in HN.
- vkaku 7y ago
  Okay, all is fair in a really healthy discussion. The reason I write what I write anyway is because I believe in them. Your point is taken and accepted. I've slammed Google, FB and some other tech companies on certain occasions BTW, and I absolutely never felt bad about it. Thanks!

irrational 7y ago

We've been working on migrating from Oracle to Postgres for a few years now. We are about 2 weeks from being finished. It is not for the faint of heart, but it is totally worth it. The documentation is much much better, performance is equivalent or better, the sql dialect is saner, etc. Other than moving the data itself (ora2pg was invaluable for this), rewriting the queries is what has taken the most amount of time. Some of our tips on differences between oracle and postgres sql: replace nvl with coalesce replace rownum <= 1 with LIMIT 1 replace listagg with string_agg replace recursive hierarchy (start with/connect by/prior) with recursive replace minus with except replace SYSDATE with CURRENT_TIMESTAMP replace trunc(sysdate) with CURRENT_DATE replace trunc(datelastupdated) with DATE(datelastupduted) or datelastupdated::date replace artificial date sentinels/fenceposts like to_date(’01 Jan 1900’) with '-infinity'::date remove dual table references (not needed in postgres) replace decode with case statements replace unique with distinct replace to_number with ::integer replace mod with % operator replace merge into with INSERT ... ON CONFLICT… DO UPDATE/NOTHING change the default of any table using sys_guid() as a default to gen_random_uuid() oracle pivot and unpivot do not work in postgres - use unnest ORDER BY NLSSORT(english, 'NLS_SORT=generic_m') becomes ORDER BY gin(insensitive_query(english) gin_trgm_ops) Oracle: uses IS NULL to check for empty string; in postgres, empty string and null are different If a varchar/text column has a unique index a check needs to be made to make sure empty strings are changed to nulls before adding or updating the column. PostgreSQL requires a sub-SELECT surrounded by parentheses, and an alias must be provided for it. - SELECT * FROM ( ) A any functions in the order by clause must be moved to the select statement (e.g. order by lower(column_name)) Any sort of numeric/integer/bigint/etc. inside of a IN statement must not be a string (including 'null' - don't bother trying to use null="" it won't work). Concatenating a NULL with a NOT NULL will result in a NULL. Pay attention to any left joins. If a column from a left join is used in a where or select clause it might be null. For sequences, instead of .nextval use nextval('')

michannne 7y ago
Using SQL Server exclusively has given me a Never-Oracle mindset. Some of these differences sound insane. and > any functions in the order by clause must be moved to the select statement (e.g. order by lower(column_name)) I'd pull the hair outta my head

darksaints 7y ago

It should be noted that the email that Steve Yegge made famous was: 1) The birth of the service oriented architecture as a standard at Amazon 2) Took place long before AWS was used by Amazon's commercial business, and most software systems were monolithic, requiring mainframe-like dedicated hardware. 3) Was inspired due to the epic spaghetti monster known as FC Software, whose entire non-architecture revolved around a massive Oracle database. When Amazon hit the limits of scaling the Oracle databases with beefier hardware, they realized what a clusterfuck they had created. There were literally hundreds of applications, doing different things, but all connected to the oracle database. The oracle database functioned as a database, but also as a high throughput queue, as well as a message passing platform. At high loads, different applications were hitting the same rows so frequently that the transaction errors alone could bring down an entire fulfillment center. And it should also be noted that it was the same FC Systems (the inspiration for the move towards SOA) that took 12 years to finally get rid of Oracle. Moral of the story: you need competent software architects, and at the very least, a scalability plan. Also, fuck Oracle.

zzzcpan 7y ago
> The oracle database functioned as a database, but also as a high throughput queue, as well as a message passing platform. At high loads, different applications were hitting the same rows so frequently that the transaction errors alone could bring down an entire fulfillment center. Isn't that how everyone uses Oracle? I've seen exactly the same complains from developers at banks. Although building software around big featureful RDBMSs in general encourages poor architectures and messy software.
- uxp 7y ago
  I've seen the same architecture implemented in MSSQL and MySQL. It's pretty easy to paint yourself into a corner where your one database is doing all sorts of stupid things because you never sat down and identified the problem space in the larger context and moved to a wider configuration instead of simply using a table with short-lived rows as a queue. It's the same arguments about nails and hammers.
7y ago

exabrial 7y ago

Oracle should have been doing everything to keep them as a customer and push their databases through cloud offerings. They already push their software through resellers, sort of the same thing, just automatic

WomanCanCode 7y ago
Do you know what is happening to their cloud offering?
- exabrial 7y ago
  From what I understand it's mainly being thrown at governments. Why do you ask?

throwaway981211 7y ago

What that article doesn’t capture is how many engineers absolutely burned out working against unreasonable deadlines and cut throat managers.

latchkey 7y ago

They beat their own estimates: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/amazon-plans-to-move-off-oracle-software-by-early-2020.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/01/amazon-plans-to-move-off-ora...

WomanCanCode 7y ago

Any reason why Larry Ellison is still running the company?

arrty88 7y ago

How much did the actual migration effort cost them?

decoyworker 7y ago

The sooner that IBM and Oracle die the better.

dade_ 7y ago

The business case to stop managing Oracle contracts and licencing is probably pretty good, especially when factoring in the sick days and stress leave of employees dealing with their infuriating people, processes and tools.

the_duke 7y ago

The video feels like a big middle finger to Oracle. "stop oracle", and the URL https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/freedom https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/freedom. Not that I'm complaining, Oracle deserves all the hate they get for their business practices. But associating AWS with "breaking free" is extremely ironic. It's just as much of a source for vendor lock in as Oracle. If you are not extremely careful/dedicated with your system design, you are never moving off of AWS ever again, or only with a huge engineering effort that almost no-one will swallow. AWS also knows this very well: discounts are harder to come by if they can tell you are totally locked in to their infrastructure. Combine that with the fact that AWS loves to fork OS projects and build products out of them, without contributing back upstream. AWS is a terrific platform in many ways, but it is certainly not something that will lead to freedom of choice.

mzkply 7y ago
I guess the only freedom is that of multi-year license contracts.
jpalomaki 7y ago
This is kind of reply to Larry Ellison's comments [1] about how Amazon can't run their business on their own databases. [1] https://youtu.be/xrzMYL901AQ?t=50 https://youtu.be/xrzMYL901AQ?t=50
- perspective1 7y ago
  "They have been unable to migrate to AWS <pause> because it's not good enough." No, Larry, it's because database migration is hard and risky.
- throwaway981211 7y ago
  I work at Amazon. Ellisons assessment is trash meant to fool maybe Wall Street analysts, but as an engineer, his claims are laughable. In reality, database migrations are hard. Removing that factor entirely for a moment, engineers don’t want to work on lift and shift projects. They come to Amazon to build interesting shit. Now imagine database migrations are easy and your engineers love this work - well, now it turns out you’ve basically stopped real innovation in your organizations to do this operational work for cost savings. I could go on... there are so many factors why it took Amazon a while to get off Oracle. Ellison is a heaping pile of dog shit fraudster. Before you dismiss me as being biased, look at my post history. I’m critical enough of Amazon.

tyingq 7y ago

Is "Amazon's Consumer Area" deliberately specific? That is, are they still using Oracle somewhere else? (Despite 75 petabytes being significant) Edit: I did see "some third-party applications are tightly bound to Oracle and were not migrated". Curious if that's all that is left, globally, at AMZN.

sillypuddy 7y ago
There are Oracle AWS offerings - https://aws.amazon.com/oracle/ https://aws.amazon.com/oracle/
- tyingq 7y ago
  Good example of what I'm asking for. Does AMZN use any Oracle RDS, or other Oracle offerings, aside from what they just retired?

edf13 7y ago

Amazon Polly works well! First time I’ve used it ~ hit play and let it read the article whilst I did a few other things!

hackernewsboy 7y ago

is this purpose built database based on mysql?

hackernewsboy 7y ago

is this purpose built database based on mysql or postgresql?

IronWolve 7y ago

Oracle goes after customers with 3rd party companies, if you use oracle expect calls for audits and more licenses. You download virtualbox extension at work? Thats a fee per user. Use an Oracle VM in a vmware cluster? They want paid for all cores in your environment now. Seriously, Oracle goes after their customers like criminals. I refuse their calls at work, they really are just looking for something to make you pay.

toyg 7y ago
> Oracle goes after customers with 3rd party companies That's going to end soon - the partner ecosystem has been royally shafted by Oracle's big "cloud push", people are moving away from a vendor who simply sold them down the river; and in their Brave New Cloud World, there is no need for license resellers and auditors. Ironically, that might end up improving Oracle's reputation - they'll just be seen like Google, where everything is automated and support goes from mediocre to nonexistent.
generatorguy 7y ago
I tried to license virtualbox extensions and they told me to call back when I wanted at least 500 licenses.

AtlasBarfed 7y ago

Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company whose customer relations strategy seems to actively involve litigating them as a default assumption. Amazon is considered a paragon of IT, so their expulsion of Oracle is a useful tool at the CIO/CTO level of "nobody ever got fired for IBM" level of reasoning. Unfortunately, AWS is becoming the new IBM in that reasoning. Great that it took ten years to reach that level of agreement, now hybrid cloud needs to take over the grey haired CIO / CTO level. Long live Postgresql!

outworlder 7y ago
> whose customer relations strategy seems to actively involve litigating them as a default assumption They are not nice to their partners either.
Wistar 7y ago
Back in the early days of Oxygen Media I remember the then CTO saying that Oracle's pricing model appeared to him to be based on turning the customer upside down to empty all of the money from their pockets.
- baq 7y ago
  And the final invoice would be for $30k more...
gopalv 7y ago
> Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company Amazon and Oracle couldn't be more different in this point of view. Amazon's predatory instincts are pointed inwards and downwards, towards employees and vendors, while being mostly great towards the customer. Everything from their warehouse workers with timers, the crying software engineers and all other things I hear about them are about running an internally facing extraction economy. The squeeze is being put on those who draw a paycheck (or at least, a profit) from Amazon, while the consumers see instant access servers on EC2, Amazon Go for lunch breaks in a city or One hour shipping of diapers. In comparison, Oracle seems to be going after those who pay them already.

LrnByTeach 7y ago

Here is the meat of the Report: >We migrated 75 petabytes of internal data stored in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases to multiple AWS database services including Amazon DynamoDB,Aurora, RDS, and Redshift. >We kept careful track of the costs and the performance, and realized the following results: >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%.

chrisseaton 7y ago
How did they negotiate a discount when they weren’t yet able to move off the database? ‘Give us a discount or...’ or what?
- TooCleverByHalf 7y ago
  I'd guess it goes something like, "We have 75 petabytes of data to move over and would like to use your services but are concerned about costs. What kind of prices can you give us?".
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    But they’ve got no choice - there’s no ‘or else’ until they’re able to move off. What stopped Oracle charging them a billion dollars a CPU for the last few years since they’ve already announced they were moving off?
    - Yeroc 7y ago
      On the other hand if Oracle started charging more that would allow Amazon to justify spending more on internal investment to speed up the migration.
    - erikpukinskis 7y ago

iRobbery 7y ago

"This team moved 40 TB of data with just one hour of downtime, and realized the same or better performance at half the cost, powered by Amazon Aurora." Would have loved to have read some technical details on how 40 Tbyte was transferred in an hour, even migrated.

remus 7y ago
Presumably they didn't go for a 'turn it off, do the transfer, turn it on again' strategy. I'd guess they transferred the bulk of the data beforehand then applied incremental updates until the databases matched then turned off the old db.
Havoc 7y ago
>Would have loved to have read some technical details on how 40 Tbyte was transferred in an hour, even migrated. Perhaps I'm missing something but that doesn't seem hard considering: 1) It's only like 3x high end consumer level 16TB HDDs 2) This is Amazon...they have AWS - really fat pipes and endless horsepower on demand
- kondro 7y ago
  Have you tried transferring 40TB from 3x spinning disk HDD… let alone an actively running DB infrastructure? The maximum sustained transfer rate of a 16TB Seagate Exos X16 is 261MB/s. That would take 17 hours to transfer at full speed. Not that the data storage would look like that, but even at 100Gbps networking operating at 80% (about what you'd achieve realistically) it would take 70 minutes to transfer 40TB at full wire speeds. But we're not talking about full-wire speeds. We're talking about exporting from an Oracle DB and importing to an entirely different DB. The file transfer task isn't the hard bit, it's the actual data migration along the way. That's a massive undertaking and I'm surprised any of the migration tasks were able to complete with such a small amount of downtime.

denimnerd42 7y ago

We have a huge database problem at my company (department). There are only 4 databases for 200 developers. I find this extremely cumbersome to develop on. Ideally there would be at least 1 DB per developer plus some shared environments. What do others do?

choiway 7y ago

Larry might need to sell his island.

senderista 7y ago

Notice they don't say that AWS has completely migrated off Oracle. There was plenty of Oracle there 5 years ago, including at the core of some of the most popular services. (There was also a significant migration effort underway then as well, mostly to DynamoDB.)

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

jpalomaki 7y ago

Oracle would have the set of tools for providing a interesting opinionated cloud/onprem platform for microservices architecture. Something along the lines of JavaEE, deployed on something derived from WebLogic, bound together with reliable messaging bus (Tuxedo), backed by Oracle database.

suyash 7y ago

Most of what Amazon is talking about is the Oracle Old database product, check out Oracle's latest offering that is powered by AI - Autonomous Databases: https://www.oracle.com/database/autonomous-database.html https://www.oracle.com/database/autonomous-database.html

orf 7y ago

> Across the 48 hours of Prime Day, these sources made 7.11 trillion calls to the DynamoDB API, peaking at 45.4 million requests per second. > The team added an additional 63 petabytes of storage ahead of Prime Day; the resulting fleet handled 2.1 trillion requests per day and transferred 185 petabytes of data per day. > Prime Day 2019 also relied on a massive, diverse collection of EC2 instances. The internal scaling metric for these instances is known as a server equivalent; Prime Day started off with 372K server equivalents and scaled up to 426K at peak. Woah. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-prime-day-2019-powered-by-aws/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-prime-day-2019-power...

apocalyptic0n3 7y ago
The largest scale I've ever needed to work at was 2 EC2 instances (really just 1 for incoming and 1 for background SQS job handling). The numbers in that post are simply staggering to me.

nojvek 7y ago

This is Jeff Bezos calling out Larry Ellison on his bullshit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzMYL901AQ&feature=youtu.be&t=50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrzMYL901AQ&feature=youtu.be...

jnaina 7y ago

Here's the key difference between Oracle and AWS: - Oracle will schedule periodic audits on their customers and legally threaten them for inadvertent licensing oversights - AWS makes it a mandatory policy that all their sales folks periodically sit with their customers to help optimise and reduce their ongoing AWS Cloud costs If you are making a case that Oracle == AWS, you don't know what you are talking about. Yes, I have dealt with both these companies up close.

philliphaydon 7y ago
> AWS makes it a mandatory policy that all their sales folks periodically sit with their customers to help optimise and reduce their ongoing AWS Cloud costs Their KPIs are to reduce costs for customers but also to increase usage of AWS services to make more money. The KPIs seem to contradict each other.
- jon-wood 7y ago
  I've been in some of these meetings, and strangely the KPIs don't actually contradict themselves. Most of the recommendations we were given were around switching workload from one way of running things to a service which would be a better fit, and because we'd be using it as intended ended up being cheaper than the original implementation.
- joncrane 7y ago
  The goal is to grow with the customer. AWS doesn't mind having a smaller piece of the pie because the pie is growing.

fierarul 7y ago

There was recently a similar story about Amazon Fulfillment turning off the final Oracle Database: https://twitter.com/jdarrow/status/1111629087947132928 https://twitter.com/jdarrow/status/1111629087947132928 I wasn't aware they are doing this PR pieces on a department by department basis. Are there any more remaining Amazon departments still doing this process?

matheusmoreira 7y ago

This is a good thing, given this description of the Oracle database: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

It took Amazon.com, a large company with tons of incentives and a strong mandate from the top floors, 7-8 years (at least!) to get out of Oracle. I can easily imagine how "normal" companies will not have such an easy time doing so. I guess we're going to have Oracle around for a long time.

truth_seeker 7y ago

Price is the only main reason I see which drive this migration. About Oracle Database (not Oracle company), I am very much in agreement that (PL)SQL can be used as one language to take care of Relational Algebra, Row oriented, Column oriented, Document oriented and also Blockchain oriented disk persistent tables with local node partitioning and distributed sharding, Graph traversals queries using recursive CTEs, auto tuning of indexes, streaming materialized views, distributed topic/queues. Oh by the way with little effort you can accomplish almost all what Oracle does with PostgreSQL and its community extensions.