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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

The video feels like a big middle finger to Oracle.

"stop oracle", and the URL https://aws.amazon.com/products/databases/freedom.

Not that I'm complaining, Oracle deserves all the hate they get for their business practices.

But associating AWS with "breaking free" is extremely ironic. It's just as much of a source for vendor lock in as Oracle.

If you are not extremely careful/dedicated with your system design, you are never moving off of AWS ever again, or only with a huge engineering effort that almost no-one will swallow. AWS also knows this very well: discounts are harder to come by if they can tell you are totally locked in to their infrastructure.

Combine that with the fact that AWS loves to fork OS projects and build products out of them, without contributing back upstream.

AWS is a terrific platform in many ways, but it is certainly not something that will lead to freedom of choice.

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This is kind of reply to Larry Ellison's comments [1] about how Amazon can't run their business on their own databases.

[1] https://youtu.be/xrzMYL901AQ?t=50

"They have been unable to migrate to AWS <pause> because it's not good enough." No, Larry, it's because database migration is hard and risky.

I work at Amazon. Ellisons assessment is trash meant to fool maybe Wall Street analysts, but as an engineer, his claims are laughable. In reality, database migrations are hard. Removing that factor entirely for a moment, engineers don’t want to work on lift and shift projects. They come to Amazon to build interesting shit. Now imagine database migrations are easy and your engineers love this work - well, now it turns out you’ve basically stopped real innovation in your organizations to do this operational work for cost savings.

I could go on... there are so many factors why it took Amazon a while to get off Oracle. Ellison is a heaping pile of dog shit fraudster. Before you dismiss me as being biased, look at my post history. I’m critical enough of Amazon.

Haha, that's a great link. I actually laughed out loud at how ridiculous his comment sounds.

I used to work on a team at Amazon that was _very_ relieved and happy to move away from Oracle and onto the AWS databases. I wasn't directly involved but I understand the migration work was monstrous. I think it's clear from Ellison's comment that Oracle considers that to be a product feature.

This is a popular opinion but it simply fails to resonate to me.

"This company's software is so useful you can't help but use it because it saves you so much time, effort, and money" is NOT lock in.

You can absolutely choose to develop on AWS In a way that avoids lock-in (Containers, managed DB engines, other cloud storage providers have s3-compatible apis). People don't because it's more CONVENIENT not to - nobody is forcing the to.

Exactly. I currently host my side project on Digital Ocean, but before that I was on AWS and before that I was on Heroku. I'm considering a move to Azure in the future. And switching between these services costs me basically nothing in time and almost zero code.

I started on Heroku, switched to AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Didn't much care for it so I switched to AWS EC2, running Dokku to replicate the Heroku experience. Simple database backup and restore with Postgres I manage myself. Switched to DO with the same setup with zero downtime. I expect Azure will be the same.

You create your own lock-in to save time and/or money. Those are business decisions like any other business decision. But in no way are any cloud providers forcing lock-in.

In the same vein of oracle trying the one-ring-to-bind them, RDS is amazing on many levels, but AWS is all in on database lockin with their customers.

RDS probably affords enough flexibility to get your data out, but Dynamo... that's a different story.

Aurora actively makes me want AWS to have my data. It's the only thing that AWS has that I miss on a daily basis.

Can you elaborate? I'm kicking tires at the moment.

Fully MySQL/PostgreSQL-compatible DBMS with automatic failover across AZs so you get upgrades all the time, fully managed, without ever having downtime. It's really good. Access management can be through IAM.

Like, Google Cloud SQL has 5 minutes of planned downtime every month by design, in comparison, or something.

I don’t believe this is accurate - Aurora has maintenance windows:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide...

Maintenance windows + Multi-AZ means that the nodes in different AZs are patched at different times, resulting in zero downtime of the app.

Better price than RDS, better speed, never worrying about the disk size and needing to plan to scale up, built in data redundancy and restart times of under a minute in the event of a crash (faster than replica failover so you don’t need a replica unless you just really want one).

I miss it. Daily. Took the amount of time I spent on DB maintenance every month from about 5 hours to about 0 hours.

You don’t need to worry about disk size in RDS now. You can set an upper limit and it will grow as it needs. No need to resize now.

How? There is literally a service dedicated to migrating databases into and off of AWS

I've seen the nice migration service for getting data INTO dynamo, but I haven't seen one for getting it out, beyond doing some custom streams.

For example, I haven't seen a cassandra sstable export tool, since Cassandra is one of the most natural export/migration targets of a large Dynamo datastore.

I'm not saying its impossible, and AWS isn't responsible for providing all databases as a migration out target, but considering they have a good cassandra importer...

I guess the only freedom is that of multi-year license contracts.

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