AWS CEO Andy Jassy confirms Oracle data warehouse switch-off at Amazon

Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy claims its parent company’s consumer business has shut its Oracle data warehouse, and is now using AWS’s own database technologies.

In a post on the social networking site, Twitter, dated Friday 9 November, Jassy confirmed the business unit shuttered its Oracle-based data warehouse on 1 November, and is now turning to AWS and its relational database technologies to fulfil its requirements.

“By [the] end of 2018, they’ll have 88% of their Oracle DBs (databases) (and 97% of critical system DBs) move to Aurora and DynamoDB,” he wrote.

In response to Jassy’s post, Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels claimed the Oracle deployment was “one of the largest (if not the largest) in the world”, before going on to discuss the benefits he claims the company is already getting as a result of the move.

“We have moved onto newer, faster, more reliable, more agile, more versatile technology at lower cost and higher scale,” he added.

News of Amazon’s migration follows on from a report published by US news site, CNBC, back in August 2018, which claimed Amazon has a multi-year migration plan in place to remove Oracle’s database technology from its own technology stack by the first quarter of 2020.

The following month, Oracle chairman and CTO, Larry Ellison, cited Amazon as a major reference user of its products during a conference call with analysts to discuss the firm’s first quarter financial results for 2019.

During the call, Ellison talked up how reliant its competitors are on the firm’s technologies during a discussion about the competitive pressures the firm is finding itself under in the cloud, before citing this as a reason why its technologies should be considered superior to what they offer.  

“The Oracle database is so much better than other databases. Even our biggest competitors use it to run their businesses. Salesforce.com uses Oracle to run their Sales Automation Cloud. SAP uses the Oracle database to run their cloud services and nearly all their on-premise customers. Even Amazon uses the Oracle database to run most of their business,” said Ellison, during the call, transcribed by Seeking Alpha.

“Today, we may be behind Amazon in infrastructure market share, but we are way ahead of Amazon in cloud infrastructure technology. We think that will allow us to gain market share in infrastructure in the cloud very, very rapidly.”

Oracle and AWS have been embroiled in a war of words over the superiority of their respective database propositions, with both firms throwing over parts of their user conferences in recent years to fire barbs at one another on this front.

This trend continued at this year’s Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco in October 2018, where Ellison took aim at AWS over the cost and performance of its technology.

“We are almost 50% faster in compute than Amazon, five times faster in block storage and twice as fast in networking. When you move to our cloud it saves you money, when you move to theirs it cost you more,” he said, in comments reported by Computer Weekly at the time.

Computer Weekly contacted Oracle for a response to this story, but had not received a response at the time of publication.