AWS Chief Jassy Launches Broadside On 'Old Guard' Database Rival Oracle

Andy Jassy, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, has officially dropped the gloves in the public cloud giant's campaign against Oracle and other "old guard" database vendors.

At the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas Wednesday, Jassy unveiled a preview of a new cloud service that can migrate on-premise Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL production databases to the AWS cloud.

The AWS Database Migration Service is significantly faster and less expensive than current methods for moving databases to the cloud, according to Jassy. It takes about 10 to 15 minutes to set up the service, which can migrate a 1-TB on-premise database for about $3, he said.

[Related: Why AWS Is An Enterprise Force To Be Reckoned With]

Jassy said AWS has also added support for MariaDB, an open-source MySQL database engine, and launched a new offering called the AWS Schema Conversion Tool, which makes it possible to switch between different database engines.

In his keynote, Jassy said AWS offers "freedom from bad database relationships," an apparent reference to recent reports of Oracle stepping up licensing audits of customers and pressuring them to purchase cloud credits.

Jassy suggested that AWS is seeing customers of Oracle and other database vendors switching to its Aurora cloud database service and RedShift cloud data warehousing service.

An Oracle spokeswoman declined to comment.

Aurora, a MySQL-compatible relational database engine that AWS unveiled as a preview last November and started selling a few months ago, has overtaken RedShift as the fastest-growing cloud service in AWS' history, said Jassy.

Aurora offers similar -- or better -- performance as Oracle and other databases on the market, at a price that's about one-tenth of what these vendors charge, said Jassy.

Craig Atkinson, CEO of JHC Technology, a Waldorf, Md.-based AWS partner, said Aurora is just the latest example of the public cloud giant putting pressure on competitors with aggressively priced services.

"The release of these products means that the consumer is not forced into a single, pricey option, and the AWS competitor generally has to reduce their costs to compete. The customer wins because they have more and cheaper options," Atkinson told CRN.

GE, Expedia, PG&E and NBCUniversal are currently using Aurora, and Jassy said AWS has many other customers that wish to remain anonymous.

"There is a huge amount of traction for Aurora, because customers want commercial database performance at the pricing of an open-source database," Jassy said.

PUBLISHED OCT. 7, 2015