How AWS Database Migration Service helps accelerate Cloud adoption

AWS Database Migration Service helps you migrate databases to AWS quickly and securely. The source database remains operational during the migration, minimizing downtime to applications that rely on the database. The AWS Database Migration Service can migrate your data to and from the most widely used commercial and open-source databases.

AWS Database Migration Service supports homogeneous migrations such as Oracle-to-Oracle, as well as heterogeneous migrations between different database platforms, such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon Aurora.

Homogeneous Database Migrations

In homogeneous database migrations, the source and target database engines are the same or are compatible—like Oracle to Amazon RDS for Oracle, MySQL to Amazon Aurora, and MySQL to Amazon RDS for MySQL, or Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon RDS for SQL Server. Since the schema structure, data types, and database code are compatible between the source and target databases, this kind of migration is a one-step process. You create a migration task with connections to the source and target databases, and then start the migration with the click of a button. AWS Database Migration Service takes care of the rest. The source database can be located in your own premises outside of AWS, running on an Amazon EC2 instance, or it can be an Amazon RDS database. The target can be a database in Amazon EC2 or Amazon RDS.

Heterogeneous Database Migrations

In heterogeneous database migrations, the source and target database engines are different—like in the case of Oracle to Amazon Aurora, Oracle to PostgreSQL, or Microsoft SQL Server to MySQL migrations. In this case, the schema structure, data types, and database code of source and target databases can be quite different, requiring a schema and code transformation before the data migration starts. That makes heterogeneous migrations a two-step process. First, use the AWS Schema Conversion Tool to convert the source schema and code to match that of the target database. Then use the AWS Database Migration Service to migrate data from the source database to the target database. All required data types will be automatically converted during the migration. The source database can be located in your own premises outside of AWS, running on an Amazon EC2 instance, or it can be an Amazon RDS database. The target can be a database in Amazon EC2 or Amazon RDS.

AWS Database Migration Service can be used to migrate data both into and out of the cloud for development purposes. There are two common scenarios. The first is deploying development, test, or staging systems on AWS to take advantage of the cloud’s scalability and rapid provisioning. This lets developers and tester use copies of real production data, then copy updates back to the on-premises production system. The second scenario is when development systems are on-premises (often on personal laptops) and you migrate a current copy of an AWS Cloud production database to these on-premises systems—either once or continuously. You can avoid a disruption to existing DevOps processes while ensuring the up-to-date representation of your production system.

You can use AWS Database Migration Service to consolidate multiple source databases into a single target database. This can be done for homogeneous and heterogeneous migrations, and you can use this feature with all supported database engines. The source databases can be located in your own premises outside of AWS, running on an Amazon EC2 instance, or it can be an Amazon RDS database. The source databases can also be spread across different locations. For example, one of the source databases can be in your own premises outside of AWS, while the second one in Amazon EC2, and the third one in an Amazon RDS database. The target can be a database in Amazon EC2 or Amazon RDS.

Coforge is helping several customers migrate and modernize database via AWS native services to enable and accelerate cloud adoption