Amazon Consumer business completes internal database migration

Cloud has changed the world. Amazon’s cloud arm, AWS, has been one of the biggest motivators of cloud computing’s growth but still, Amazon has relied on Oracle’s databases to store much of its consumer business data. But today, the e-commerce giant announced that the internal database migration of Amazon’s consumer business is now complete.

The effort involved the participation of over 100 teams in Amazon’s Consumer business. This included well-known brands such as Alexa, Amazon Prime, Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Music, Kindle, Amazon Fresh, Audible, Shopbop, Twitch, and Zappos. Additionally, internal teams such as AdTech, Consumer Payments, Catalog Systems, Customer Returns, Amazon Fulfillment Technology, Deliver Experience, Digital Devices, External Payments, Finance, InfoSec, Marketplace, Ordering, and Retail Systems.

The development is great for Amazon as the company will save a lot in spending both time and expenses. Over the years, the company has had to make efforts to manage and scale thousands of legacy Oracle databases.  

In total, the company migrated 75 petabytes of data which was stored in around 7,500 Oracle databases to multiple AWS database services including Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon DynamoDB. The Vice President and Chief Evangelist of AWS, Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post that the company was able to achieve this feat with little to no downtime. The migration will now give the internal teams the freedom to choose the best AWS database service that will fit their needs.