Traditional databases like Oracle now history: Amazon CTO (IANS Special)

Retail giant Amazon that rode on its growing Cloud business to log $72.4 billion sales in the fourth quarter ending December last strongly believes that traditional databases that companies like Oracle provide are gone and customers are now seeking data compute and storage solutions to solve specific problem sets.

According to Amazon's Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Werner Vogels as the Cloud continues to drive down the cost of storage and compute, a new generation of applications has emerged, creating a new set of requirements for databases.

"Unlike traditional databases which claim to solve every possible scenario, we believe in giving more choices to the customers who are constantly looking for databases that can solve a particular problem set for them," Vogels told IANS in an interview.

The new generation of applications has created a new set of requirements for databases which Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's Cloud arm, is ready to meet.

These applications need databases to store terabytes to petabytes of new types of data -- like the one coming from space -- to provide access to the data with millisecond latency, process millions of requests per second, and scale to support millions of users anywhere in the world.

"To support these requirements, you need both relational and non-relational databases that are purpose-built to handle the specific needs of your applications," Vogels noted.

The relational databases are for transactional applications while non-relational databases cater to big data and real-time web applications.

AWS offers the broadest range of databases (total of 16 to date), purpose-built for specific application use cases.

AWS saw sales up 45 per cent from the prior year to $7.4 billion in the fourth quarter. The company now provides 60 Cloud Availability Zones across 20 infrastructure regions globally, with another 12 Availability Zones and four regions coming online by the first half of 2020.

The company launched AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Region with two availability zones in 2016 and has seen stupendous growth in adding new customers in the region.

"We believe in giving more choices for customers. If the reasons are compelling enough, customers will shun traditional databases and come to our databases," said Vogels.

Amazon will be completely off Oracle databases by the end of 2019.

"The whole debate is about who innovates better and currently, we are at the forefront to bring more purpose-built databases in the market," the Amazon CTO announced.

On security, he said "encrypting everything" from the privacy point of view is the way to go.

"We need to safeguard critical business data as cyber attacks are getting very sophisticated. Security is the top reason enterprises are moving their workloads to AWS Cloud," said Vogels.

Hundreds of thousands of customers have embraced AWS database services because these perform and scale better, easier to manage, cost effective, and more reliable than old-guard database offerings.

"Security is top priority for us. We have made massive innovations in and around security, building tools that are not available on-premises for our customers. Amazon clocks over 600 billions records every day so you can imagine the kind of security layers in there. And we are constantly innovating on security," informed Vogels.

(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)

--IANS

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