AWS CEO Jassy Taunts Oracle’s Ellison After Amazon Turns Off Oracle Data Warehouse
Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy said Friday that Amazon's migration away from Oracle databases recently took another major step forward.
Jassy tweeted that Amazon's consumer business on Nov. 1 "turned off" its Oracle data warehouse—a technology for storing large amounts of data typically used for analytics and business intelligence.
Jassy took the moment as an opportunity to punch back at Oracle founder and CTO Larry Ellison, who last month at the Oracle OpenWorld conference boasted about Amazon's dependence on Oracle technology, despite the enmity between the two technology giants.
"In latest episode of "uh huh, keep talkin' Larry," Amazon’s Consumer business turned off its Oracle data warehouse Nov 1 and moved to Redshift. By end of 2018, they'll have 88% of their Oracle DBs (and 97% of critical system DBs) moved to Aurora and DynamoDB. #DBFreedom
In latest episode of "uh huh, keep talkin' Larry," Amazon’s Consumer business turned off its Oracle data warehouse Nov 1 and moved to Redshift. By end of 2018, they'll have 88% of their Oracle DBs (and 97% of critical system DBs) moved to Aurora and DynamoDB. #DBFreedom
— Andy Jassy (@ajassy) November 9, 2018
[Related: Amazon Will Extricate Itself From Oracle Tech By 2020: Report]
Oracle declined comment. CRN has reached out to AWS for comment.
Ethan Simmons, managing partner of Pinnacle Technology Partners, an AWS partner based in Boston, told CRN he's not surprised by Jassy's tweet, and Amazon's desire to get off Oracle.
"Our clients are asking us to help them do the same exact thing," Simmons said.
And there's no doubt Amazon will succeed in migrating all its systems to its own database products. Anything is possible with time and unlimited money," he said.
Amazon's efforts to migrate away from Oracle's leading database platform and onto native AWS services like RedShift, Aurora and DynamoDB have been ongoing for years as a war of words has intensified between their senior executives.
CNBC, citing people familiar with the matter, reported in August that Amazon believed it was less than two years away from realizing its long-envisioned plan to separate entirely from Oracle.
During his OpenWorld keynote, Ellison mocked a recent attempt that caused massive glitches for the e-commerce giant.
Ellison referenced a CNBC news story about a 25-page Amazon "correction of error" report that detailed how a move from Oracle to its own Aurora PostgreSQL resulted in database degradation, creating "lags and complete outages" on Amazon Prime Day.
That fourth annual Amazon Prime Day, a promotion for premium Amazon.com members that drives more sales than Black Friday and Cyber Monday, was marred by widespread outages that ultimately delayed deliveries for thousands of customers.
In an earnings call last December, Ellison also asserted Amazon "is not moving off of Oracle" and shared with investors that Amazon spent $50 million on Oracle technology in the quarter.
"I don’t think they can do it," Ellison said, adding that Amazon has tried for a decade but doesn't have the technology to cut it.
The verbal arrows have flown in both directions.
At last year's AWS re:Invent conference, Jassy challenged partners to "find a lot of customers using Oracle who are actually happy about it."
Jassy didn't directly acknowledge his company was one of those unhappy customers.
“Amazon is famous for eating their own dog food. Developing an application for themselves then productizing it for the world to use on their AWS Cloud,” said Jarrod Levitan, chief growth officer at Onica, an AWS partner.
“Given Amazon’s acidic relationship with Oracle, and their recent announcement to end their use of the database, I expect to see enhancements to AWS services incentivizing and making it easier for Oracle customers to migrate their data to AWS rich set of data stores and tools.”