Amazon Web Services Announces General Availability of Database Migration Service

Cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) has announced that the AWS Database Migration Service is now available to all customers.

AWS Database Migration Services is a fully managed service that allows customers to easily migrate their production Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL databases from on-premises data centers to AWS with “virtually no downtime”, according to a statement.

The full launch of Database Migration Services comes just  five months after Amazon first announced the services in October 2015.

Amazon claims that customers have used the AWS Database Migration Service preview to move more than 1,000 databases to the AWS Cloud since January 1, 2016. Many of these customers, says Amazon, also used the AWS Schema Conversion Tool to switch database engines and break free from the cost and complexity of old guard commercial databases.

“Hundreds of customers moved more than a thousand of their on-premises databases to Amazon Aurora, other Amazon RDS engines, or databases running on Amazon EC2 during the preview of the AWS Database Migration Service,” said Hal Berenson, Vice President, Relational Database Services, AWS in a statement. “Customers repeatedly told us they wanted help moving their on-premises databases to AWS, and also moving to more open database engine options, but the response to the AWS Database Migration Service has been even stronger than we expected. In the preview, one-third of the database migrations used the AWS Database Migration Service to not only move databases to the AWS Cloud, but also to switch database engines in the process.”

Costs of Amazon Database Migration vary depending on the size of the migration, but Amazon claims that  customers can migrate terabyte-sized on-premises Oracle, SQL Server, and open source databases to the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) or to a database running on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for as little as $3/TB. And all that with “virtually no downtime”— according to the cloud computing giant, customers can set up their migrations in less than ten minutes.

The AWS Database Migration Service is available in the US East (N. Virginia), US-West (Oregon), US-West (N. California), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Regions and will expand to additional Regions in the coming months.

Amazon’s announcement is well timed— just a week after Microsoft announced a new version of SQL Server and a free new program for migrating applications to SQL Server 2016.