AWS Database Migration Service now available to help customers switch to the cloud

Amazon has announced general availability of its AWS Database Migration Service, aimed at helping organisations to move production database systems from their own infrastructure to the AWS cloud with minimum disruption and at minimum cost.

The AWS Database Migration Service was first announced as a preview at the firm’s AWS re:Invent user conference in Las Vegas last autumn, but is now officially available to all AWS customers.

Amazon claims that the fully managed service enables an IT professional to migrate a database to AWS securely, cost-effectively and with no downtime, and also enables them to migrate the data set itself from one database engine such as Oracle, to another such as PostgreSQL.

The service has been developed to tempt organisations into offloading some or all of their database deployments from their own infrastructure and onto Amazon‘s cloud platform, either using the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) or by provisioning clusters of Amazon EC2 virtual machines running the database management system of their choice.

Until now, a major stumbling block has been the need for the customer to take their database offline while they copy the data, or else purchase migration tools that typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, Amazon said.;