Amazon CTO Werner Vogels says that the whole company is moving more quickly thanks to ditching some Oracle software
AmazonAmazon CTO Werner Vogels
- Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said again that one of his happiest days last year was Nov. 1, when Amazon shut down the largest Oracle data warehouse it was using and moved to Amazon Redshift.
- "With all of this, we moved to an environment that's so much more faster, so much more agile," Vogels said.
- Vogels said that Redshift is now 10 times faster than it was two years ago.
On Wednesday, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels said yet again that his "happiest day" last year was shutting the retailer's largest Oracle data warehouse and replacing it with the company's own Amazon Redshift.
Using tech from its Amazon Web Services cloud unit is making the whole company happier, too.
"With all of this, we moved to an environment that's so much more faster, so much more agile," Vogels said onstage on Wednesday at an Amazon Web Services summit.
Vogels said that in the past, data warehouses were "such an expensive piece of hardware," but Redshift is more cost-effective. Now, Redshift is "absolutely becoming the most popular cloud data warehouse out there," and it's ten times faster than it was two years ago, he says.
"In the past two years, with all these improvements and speed, we've been able to make Redshift 10 times faster," Vogels said.
Previously, CNBC reported that Amazon plans to move its infrastructure completely off Oracle's databases to Amazon Web Services by the first quarter of 2020. In other words, Amazon has about a year to hit that goal.
Oracle cofounder and CTO Larry Ellison said last August that other companies have had similar goals to move off Oracle's database and data warehousing products, but didn't succeed.
"It's kind of embarrassing when Amazon uses Oracle but they want you to use Aurora and Redshift," Ellison said, referring to Amazon Web Services' database and data warehousing products. "They've had 10 years to get off Oracle, and they're still on Oracle."
More recently, Ellison claimed to investors that Oracle's new cloud database products are pulling customers away from Amazon Web Services.