https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2018/11/1227/
2 replies (most recent on top)
One of the most important databases at Amazon.com is the data warehouse system. The reports from this giant cluster drive pricing, purchasing decisions, and helps guide web site design choices. Amazon is a data driven company and this system is the supplier of much of the data that drives daily decisions at Amazon.
There was a time when this system was running on Oracle. Like a lot of customers, Amazon was paying too much and not treated terrible well by Oracle. But at Amazon, as at most companies, serving customers is always a higher priority than spending the effort to move to another database even though better solutions were available. However there are limits to what any customer will endure and Oracle is always probing that mark. Eventually the combination of better products like Amazon Redshift being available and Oracle being so incredibly customer-unfriendly swung the attention of Amazon to the database technology choice behind the data warehouse. Quite a while back the decision was made that this vital, mission critical system simply had to come off Oracle.
Sounds like a new slide for the Re:Invent deck. Always easier to talk about historical data than current issues. Amazon can certainly decide to talk about itself. What gets the point across without giving much away?
License cost for Oracle over the years vs AWS cost now and projected leaving the $ scale off sounds about right. Certainly enough to grab the attention. Some indicator for the amount of data growth over the years would be good to head of the otherwise inevitable questions about apples and oranges.
Is sales already fighting for such a slide? Seems like something they’d really like to show future customers. :)