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Comment by LrnByTeach | Hacker News Reader

Here is the meat of the Report:

>We migrated 75 petabytes of internal data stored in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases to multiple AWS database services including Amazon DynamoDB,Aurora, RDS, and Redshift.

>We kept careful track of the costs and the performance, and realized the following results:

>Cost Reduction – We reduced our database costs by over 60% on top of the heavily discounted rate we negotiated based on our scale. Customers regularly report cost savings of 90% by switching from Oracle to AWS.

>Performance Improvements – Latency of our consumer-facing applications was reduced by 40%.

>Administrative Overhead – The switch to managed services reduced database admin overhead by 70%.

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> Customers regularly report cost savings of 90% by switching from Oracle to AWS.

How the hell is Oracle still able to charge so much? Earlier this year we were looking to spin up a temporary development instance of Oracle DB for a proof-of-concept project, but the license alone was over $50k. People were already pissed about them adding licensing costs to Java, so this kicked off an effort to start migrating to a modern tech stack.

What licensing costs? OpenJDK is free. As it always have been. OracleJDK and OpenJDK starting from version 11 are virtually the same.

> Cost Reduction – We reduced our database costs by over 60% on top of the heavily discounted rate we negotiated based on our scale. Customers regularly report cost savings of 90% by switching from Oracle to AWS.

So Amazon saves 60%, when switching to paying "cost" for Amazon services - and they still claim customers paying cost+markup save 90%?

I'm sure there's probably savings - but that math sounds optimistic.

Or more likely they're apple to oranges - porting a service that could run on a single postgres node from oracle to anything will save you maybe 10k USD a year in licensing for which you see a pretty slim return.

Oracle Enterprise (RRP) is $47,500 per unit. Software updates are $10,500 per unit per year.

An Intel core is 0.5 units.

Running Oracle on single, 4 core CPU (or VM, because you can't partially license cores and you'd be lucky to find a 4 core server CPU) is $40,000 per year in licensing alone (amortised over 5 years)… for a single machine.

Want an active/passive replication set… double that cost.

That's why we switched years ago. Going from single CPU to multiple ballooned the costs so much that it was economically viable to do the work to port everything to Postgres.

It's not "cost". Internal customers are billed the same amount as external customers.

Another thing - They reduced administrative overhead 70% and cost 60%. If I was a parser, I could say that the result is more expensive. However I think they just didn't account salary savings. That is, their admins can do other stuff now.

How did they negotiate a discount when they weren’t yet able to move off the database? ‘Give us a discount or...’ or what?

I'd guess it goes something like, "We have 75 petabytes of data to move over and would like to use your services but are concerned about costs. What kind of prices can you give us?".

But they’ve got no choice - there’s no ‘or else’ until they’re able to move off.

What stopped Oracle charging them a billion dollars a CPU for the last few years since they’ve already announced they were moving off?

On the other hand if Oracle started charging more that would allow Amazon to justify spending more on internal investment to speed up the migration.

There is an “or else” it just has latency.

I read it as saying those discounts had been negotiated over the past 10-15 years.

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