AWS Database Migration Service Reviews

At our company, we are using the solution for migration readiness analysis. For instance, when my company is working with a customer or organization that intends to migrate its infrastructure to the cloud, we use the conversion tool feature of the solution to asses the existing database structure and analyze the initiatives required for cloud migration. 

The solution's hosting services are valuable. Other vital features include the RDS used as a target and integrations with Athena and Redshift.  

At our company, sometimes we feel the migration processes are not manageable. On a few occasions, the data-capturing processes need to be reinitialized. Platform-specific issues like memory leakage and a lack of process fine-tuning arise as the solution is serverless.

My company is able to initially setup the migration processes for how the data chunks or memory gets used for the data capture process. If the migration processes ever freeze with the AWS Database Migration Service, it needs to be reinitiated right from the beginning, uploaded data needs to be removed, and some verifications need to be implemented. For being a vendor managed solution there are some cons which the user cannot control. 

I have been using AWS Database Migration Service for five years. 

I would rate the stability a nine out of ten. 

For every project in our organization that requires a database migration approach, we use AWS Database Migration Service for all such projects. 

For any issues we face with the solution in our organization, a ticket is raised with customer support for further communication. The support for the solution is handled by professionals and our organization's overall experience has been well enough. The documents provided by customer support are sometimes not very useful or informative.

The documentation provided by the support team of AWS Database Migration Service needs to be improved. Sometimes, I personally feel the basic knowledge of the solution, including information on the settings, is not transparent conveyed through the documents of the solutions provider. The documentation has been written with assumptions, so practically, when a user is trying to setup the solution, challenges or limitations may arise.

I would rate the customer support as seven out of ten. 

Neutral

At our company, we used to work with native vendor solutions for data migration, but it was impossible to move complete data infrastructure from one environment to another, for example, from Oracle to Sybase.

For such aforementioned needs to migrate extensive listings at our company, we used to split the database or use a free migration tool because large projects or customers were not present at the time in our company who could buy servers and pay for licensing as well as maintenance of database platforms.  

The product is pretty expensive. The operational costs of the solution are greater than the cost of having an on-premise solution. In the long term, the price of the solutions appears competitive when considering factors like cost of ownership, cost of human resources and expenditure for maintenance.   

The data replication feature of the solution has aided in minimizing downtime. For example, if our company is working with a large database at the customer's end, me and my peers need to use a continuous replication approach to minimize the time and decrease the amount of data left to be migrated during cut over. 

AWS Database Migration Service has impacted operational costs and efficiency in our organization in a positive way. For instance, the Schema Conversion Tool helps us in our company to covert the convertible objects and define the non-convertible objects in the targeted platform. AWS Database Migration Service allows manual effort to be calculated for transforming non-convertible objects and adopting target infrastructure. 

Some features of the solution belonging to the source systems are not supported in the target system, like the SQL language patterns; in such a scenario, the Schema Conversion Tool is used. 

I would rate the solution as eight out of ten. 

I'm using AWS Database Migration Service for migrating data from an on-premise Oracle database to a database on AWS.

What I like about AWS Database Migration Service is that it's a good product that allows you to migrate terabytes of data. My team was able to migrate almost 16TB of data using AWS Database Migration Service. The solution works fine for my use case.

What needs improvement in AWS Database Migration Service is that it lacks a log file validation feature. If the solution could provide more details about a particular transaction, that would be helpful.

The stability of AWS Database Migration Service for online CDC records also needs to be improved.

I've been using AWS Database Migration Service for more than six months now.

AWS Database Migration Service is not as stable for large volumes of data, especially when you process CDC records daily.

AWS Database Migration Service is a scalable solution.

In terms of the technical support provided for AWS Database Migration Service, seventy percent of the team is knowledgeable, and the remaining thirty percent isn't as knowledgeable.

Sometimes, the response from support is very slow, and for every question, you'll get the same kind of answers. The technical support team should analyze the errors properly, especially with production and queue errors because I don't see that happening currently.

AWS Database Migration Service has a straightforward setup. On a scale of one to five, I'm rating the initial setup four out of five.

I'm not aware of the pricing for AWS Database Migration Service.

AWS Database Migration Service has two users within my company. It's me and another person, though that other person doesn't use the solution as much. I only use AWS Database Migration Service whenever data migration is required.

I'm rating AWS Database Migration Service eight out of ten.

My company has a partnership with AWS Database Migration Service.

We utilize it for mostly heterogeneous migration when you are migrating from one RDBMS platform to another. Obviously, we can use it for homogeneous migrations as well. However, it really comes in handy when you are migrating from the same source platform to the same destination. 

You get a lot of other options for migration, for example, you get different types of backups. You get the option for the native replication being supported by the RDBMS engines. However, when you are migrating from one platform to another platform, which is a heterogeneous case, you need some kind of Golden Gate, CDC, and all that. DMS with heterogeneous migration is, therefore, really very handy, particularly with data transformation and migration use cases.

They're working and improving this service further. They were developing DMS for various use cases, including those specific to Babel Fish. 

It is easy to set up. 

The solution can scale. 

It is very stable. 

Support is helpful.

The performance of data migration could be smoother.

I've been using the solution for almost a year. 

The solution has been stable in my experience. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

This is a very scalable product. Expanding out is easy.

The most recent project I did was with a data size that was relatively small. In past, some of my colleagues told me that DMS gets performance issues and that the data migration performance issues they faced happened when the data size was huge. On the other hand, AWS says that for huge data sizes, you need to increase the size of your resources. Therefore, I cannot say with confidence if the issues were the fault of the product or the fault of the size of resources. However, I have heard it lacks performance for large data sets.

We've used the solution for two clients in two different data migrations. 

Technical support has been good. they are helpful and responsive. 

It is very easy to set up the solution. It's not complex at all. 

Users do need to pay for licensing, and the cost is based on the resources used. 

I'd recommend the solution to others.

I'd rate the product eight out of ten. 

Our primary use case is that I can easily automate. I don't want many resources working on setting up a new IDE and creating an application and so on. We can make use of the existing applications in the cloud and I can do a workflow management very easily.

In selected or traditional databases on-premise, the backup and maintenance are very difficult. If you are maintaining a complete platform, like a Linux platform, you will need to apply some regular DB patches, so things are very difficult here. But in AWS RDS, there are many databases available for which the maintenance will be taken care of by the AWS team and different scalable databases also available. For example, currently we are using other database subscriptions which are very useful for my applications. Earlier we had Oracle Streams but we migrated to Aurora.

The process is now simplified because there won't be maintenance. Usually we can take a snapshot of the number I need. We can automate the backup snapshots and we can restore it very quickly. We get many benefits from the application. For example, day to day, there are developers trying to run SQL scripts which will cause problems in the database. So instead of troubleshooting, I can simply roll back to the existing set so that they can work easily. The support that I get for my project and the deadline to release one new feature will usually take three to four months on on-premise. Now, since I have migrated to AWS, I can finish it in one or two months.

There is something where AWS Database Migration can be improved. Many of the application teams don't want to invest on a migration. They don't want to use the Database Migration service. They want us to export to the dump point, database backup, and then put it into the RDS. There is not a cast and mold on it except in the database and that's it. So migrating from here and pushing the data from on-premise to AWS cloud is a big challenge, and a few more services from AWS would be helpful. For example, currently we are using ILDB internet tools which move data from on-premise to AWS cloud. I need a few more services which would be really helpful for me to move the master data.

I have been using AWS Database Migration Service for almost four years to move applications from on-premise to AWS cloud.

It is stable in terms of the data. 

It is scalable. Nothing that we execute needs to be touched in the database. They simply do the code only. So whatever changes we do in the database will be tracked.

If you raise an AWS support issue you will get an immediate response from them so I can resolve my issue as early as possible. That is a good thing. That is why I am likely to take the support from AWS and enable the service very quickly. They have good experts who are available. That has been my experience.  Let's take an example from IBM technical support. I raised a case related to the IBM One Sheet. I'm following up now for one week and they are not responding properly.

I have not explored other solutions like GCP or Azure, but I have used the AWS side. On a scale of one to ten, I would give AWS Database Migration a seven. 

This score is because of a few difficulties I faced when setting it up. Because I worked on different applications on a couple of projects, I cannot completely make use of the AWS database. Maybe that is a developer mistake or something. That's the reason I am rating it a seven for now.

The tool is offered as part of AWS stacks. We use it for data migrations from on-premise to AWS stack via PostgreSQL and MySQL. We also use it for the infrastructure configuration to simplify the setup because we are going on RDS. The AWS platform will manage everything. We use it for the simplification of migration. We do not do a lot of study on how exactly to map the database provisioning.

The database migration services allow us to do real-time synchronization of on-premise and database to plan out our releases. We do prod testing to keep the prod data in sync, at the same time, not expose it much. The automation of this synchronization helps us ensure the data is consistent in both AWS and on-prem. Then we can switch over wherever you need it. Parallely, we can do production performance testing and user experience testing without actually writing a lot of code. It comes out of the box. It is one feature that we like a lot.

The other feature I like is schema migration. When we want to upgrade it to MySQL, we can easily upgrade it. It is another stack. We haven’t used database migration. We can use it if we want to move from Oracle to PostgreSQL. It also comes as an out-of-the-box solution. I think these three things are very good. However, we have not used database migration yet because we do not plan to install software yet. The solution has a good feature stack.

The product's performance could be a little bit better. It is good in terms of the data, but it is difficult for the first time. After that, the synchronization is fine. We saw a few failures because of the bandwidth the first time the data got loaded. The performance could be better, but it's only for the first time. We haven't seen any performance-related issues post the initial setup.

I am using the solution right now.

There's no issue with stability. The solution is quite stable. It has to be stable. The only reason we are moving to AWS is to be scalable and perform well.

On-premises scalability is the reason why we are moving into AWS. The product's purpose is to introduce scalability. We would not have picked it up if it was not a ten out of ten. It is expected to be scalable because of how the nodes are getting set up in AWS. We have a medium to large user group. It's for a finance-related project. So there are quite a bit of end users, but not very high. It is targeted at brokers and stock traders.

The technical support is really good. We have partnered with Amazon, and we are part of Amazon's consultation team. There's a service engineer and an overall account manager who take care of the issues. For any automation issues, we can go through them to coordinate. They provide excellent support.

Positive

The initial setup is quite easy. The product has one of the easiest installation setups.

My team, who has expertise in Data Migration Services, did the implementation in a few hours. We have five DevOps team members, two architects, one for data and one for infra and application, and managers. The development team varies. It depends on the system. The rest is the core team. Below the core team, we usually have pilot teams and project teams. We might have a specific development team if a feature enhancement needs to happen, but it is very rare. The core team comprises five DevOps, two architects, and one manager. The maintenance team takes over the maintenance of the on-premise system.

I recommend using the solution if the end goal is AWS. It should not be used for GCPRs and on-premise migration. A lot of the features are applied while the migration tool is in place. The migration tools, like data and schema migration tools, make more sense if the target infrastructure is AWS. You could not use it as a separate tool. If someone is looking at an AWS infrastructure, they have to use the product. However, if they are not looking at AWS and want to use it as a tool, they should not use it. For such cases, they can use the available free and open-source versions of the tools.

Whatever features are there in my system are all available in the solution. Out-of-box migration is also available. I don't see anything that is missing. My system is a real-time system. For me, it's a relational database with straightforward data structures. The volume is much higher if someone has big data processing migration, which may be a problem. For any big data solution, they will have to rework it. The product will not support it. When you have properly structured data, it is not that difficult for AWS to make it. I don't know how effective it will be if you have unstructured data, like big data and unstructured datasets. I have not seen a lot of use cases.

Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We've used the product for database migration from on-prem to AWS for an Oracle database.

The ease of use is great.

It is easy to set up initially.

It's scalable.

The solution has been quite stable. 

We had challenges working with the database as it was a different kind of exit. It has blobs and other types of storage which caused issues.

If they had some sort of functionality where, at a specific point in time, if I want to start a new job, it should automatically pick up from where it has been left rather than having people worry about the exact job number and the timing. If something could be automated, that will be really helpful.

I've used the solution for a while. I've used it at least over the past year.

It's a stable solution. That said, every technology or solution in the industry has its own challenges. It's a good solution overall as I've used it for multiple databases. In my past experience, it has worked, and it has done wonders.

It is scalable. For the instances it supports, it is scalable on runtime. It'll just require downtime and can be scaled up or down accordingly.

While we don't have any active projects right now, typically, we have six or seven people on the product.

I've had to reach out to support as there were challenges with the database data types. We had to reach out to technical support multiple times to get that sorted. In general, we've found them to be helpful and responsive. 

Positive

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It's not complex. 

For us, since we have many factors involved, we took at least two to three days to configure and validate things and then run the assessment and then get to the job. The configuration does not take much. The reason we had a longer time was due to the fact that it was a huge schema, around 800 GB. Therefore, it took that much time for us to evaluate and go through a preassessment. After configuring, there were challenges we had to fix. Then, after fixing them, we came back to the migration. It's a whole process. That said, the configuration altogether itself was not as much time. It was smooth.

While it is a paid service, I don't have many details about licensing or costs. It's not an aspect of the product I manage. That said, I would say it is worth the investment. 

We are AWS partners.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. 

Whether it's the right product for everybody varies from situation to situation. There is not a generic thing you can say about the service or the situation. Everyone's experience will vary depending on their requirements. That said, in general, I would recommend it to others. 

Overall, I'd rate the product seven out of ten. There were challenges. And if the preassessment is there, we should have been warned in the preassessment about the challenges. If we fixed the issues in preassessment, we wouldn't have been waiting for hours and days for a job to complete. Considering it's a huge database, it's really difficult to wait on the whole thing over very small issues.

I am using AWS Database Migration Service for migrations and relationship migrations.

The most valuable features of the AWS Database Migration Service are the ease of migration, beneficial storage system, security, and simple instance creation. Additionally, the cloud that is provided is more complete than other solutions.

AWS Database Migration Service can become complex when testing. Other solutions, such as Microsoft Azure makes it easy to do. There are more steps to complete tasks in AWS Database Migration Service than in Microsoft Azure.

I have been using AWS Database Migration Service for approximately five years.

The stability of the AWS Database Migration Service is good.

AWS Database Migration Service is scalable.

I have not contacted support.

I have used Microsoft Azure previously and it is overall easier to use than AWS Database Migration Service. 

My advice to those new to this solution is for them to take notes and know all the documentation needed for the migrations.

I rate AWS Database Migration Service a nine out of ten.

We have a database team that supports migrations to public, private, and hybrid clouds depending on the client's needs.

Prior to the migration, during the earlier stages, we had a lot of problems. SCT is a migration tool provided by Amazon that helps us to convert the schema. 

We have an in-built tool provided by Amazon. It is a database migration tool that supports a smooth migration. The solution is instantaneous. We can launch the service and reduce the end number of manpower.

Our organization works with both client data migration and the cost governance part. Years ago, the price was nominal and acceptable for the client to do a migration. Now, prices are challenging, especially with versions continually changing.

We have Azure and GCP in place. Amazon provides a hybrid solution, so people are accustomed to adapting all these technologies. Cost is the only factor that is challenging.

AWS Database is supporting six or seven flavors of RDS. In the next release, I would like to extend the other database as well. There is a need for extra features that are available in open source. For example, for Postgres, we have limited features of admin availability. If it were standard, it would be very helpful for the database team as well as the migration team.

I have been working with AWS Database Migration Service for six years.

This is a stable solution. In the past six years, we have faced two or three periods of downtime for a few minutes each time.

AWS Database Migration Service is scalable. The solution was configured six years ago. When the threshold is reached, the system will automatically scale up. When the threshold is reduced, the system will reduce the resources. 

We have over 10,000 users of AWS Database Migration Service.

We contact customer service and support, through chat or a call, with any issues we encounter.

I would rate customer service and support a four out of five overall.

Positive

The composition of AWS Database Migration Service is simple. However, each and every code that is legacy creates dynamic code. Whatever solution worked today can not be reused in the next migration. 

On a scale of one to five, with five being a good price, I would rate AWS Database Migration Service a two.

We are part of a database team. We get requests from Azure on-premise and hybrid data migration as well. We work with different cloud providers. Azure is more cost-effective than Amazon. We selected Amazon because it started first.

Overall, I would rate AWS Database Migration Service an eight out of 10.