AWS Database Migration Service

AWS DMS makes it easy to migrate relational databases, data warehouses, NoSQL databases, and other types of data stores. Its primary use case is to migrate databases to AWS. It does so securely and with almost no downtime.

Not only does AWS DMS help migrate homogeneously, meaning the same type of database to the same type of database, such as Oracle to Oracle – it also helps migrate heterogeneously, for example, Oracle to Aurora. It can even consolidate databases into a petabyte-scale data warehouse by loading the data into Amazon Redshift and Amazon S3. AWS DMS has the ability to continuously replicate data with high availability by utilizing multi-AZ deployments. Users set up a replication instance, define source and target endpoints, and create a task that specifies what data to migrate. Downtime on the source database is minimized through the use of change data capture, or CDC, to track changes to the source data. Once tracked, AWS DMS applies them to the target, which enables the source database to be completely operational during the migration process.

AWS DMS absolutely makes homogeneous migrations simple. AWS DMS handles migrating any data, tables, and primary keys to the target while everything also remains with the source. All changes during the migration are continuously replicated, allowing the source to remain active with next to no downtime. With heterogeneous migrations, AWS provides another tool, AWS Schema Conversion Tool (SCT), to make the migration as simple as possible. This tool converts the source database schema and a majority of the database code objects to a format compatible with the target database.

AWS DMS can be used for just about any migration as it supports over 20 different database and analytics engines: Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, BigQuery, MariaDB, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and many more. It can also be used to migrate to and from databases hosted on Amazon EC2 instances. Users only pay for the compute resources and additional log storage used during the migration process. AWS DMS is helpful if you want to move managed databases, for escaping licensing costs, replicating ongoing changes, and improving integration with data lakes.