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Amazon's Move Off Oracle Caused Prime Day Outage in One of its Biggest Warehouses, Internal Report Says (cnbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the closer-look dept.

Amazon is learning how hard it can be to move off of Oracle's database software. From a report: On Prime Day, while the e-retailer was dealing with a major website glitch that slowed sales, the company was also dealing with a technical problem in Ohio at one of its biggest warehouses, leading to thousands of delayed package deliveries, according to an internal report obtained by CNBC. The problem was in large part due to Amazon's migration from Oracle's database to its own technology, the documents show. The outage underscores the challenge Amazon faces as it looks to move completely off Oracle's database by 2020, and how difficult it is to re-create that level of reliability. It also shows that Oracle's database is more efficient in some aspects than Amazon's rival software, a point that Oracle will likely emphasize during this week's annual OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

7 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Really? by willaien · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Was it just a regular outage that could have happened to anyone, or something very specific to their own infrastructure?

    Just because a change was made at some point in the past, you don't get to just assume that everything would have been fine if Change X or Y hadn't been made. Oracle isn't a silver bullet.

    1. Re:Really? by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Was it just a regular outage that could have happened to anyone, or something very specific to their own infrastructure?

      Just because a change was made at some point in the past, you don't get to just assume that everything would have been fine if Change X or Y hadn't been made. Oracle isn't a silver bullet.

      This, and the obvious risk of issues anytime you make such a large change. You fix them and move on. "thousands of delayed packages" sounds like a blip for Amazon. Bad weather can do that.

  2. Re:MongoDB is webscale by AlanBDee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't understand why Oracle even exists given my experience with it.

    Because it's a damn good database. The question isn't about it's capabilities, it's whether it's worth the cost. As for their other products I agree with you; it's way too sluggish. But I believe Amazon was just using their database.

    Now Amazon moving away from Oracle is a good thing; as servers get faster and the open source alternatives get better Oracle's database is losing it's foothold. I for one won't be sad to see that happen.

  3. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  4. Re:I think Oracle sees the writing on the wall... by sjames · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Oracle has simply overplayed their hand. For years, they have used the intrinsic difficulty of migrating as a tool to keep customers on-board in spite of constant abuse.

    They finally tightened the thumb screws one turn too tight and their customers have decided that the intrinsic pain of migration is less than the pain of staying with Oracle.

  5. Re:Bad things will happen to you! by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The article proves that the short-term pain of dumping Oracle IS worth the gain.

    >> thousands of delayed package deliveries

    Leading to what...maybe $100K's of losses at a ridiculously inflated top-end? Vs. $100,000K's of savings from not having to write Oracle checks? I think that's a trade-off any smart business would take.

  6. Re: Prime Day was worse by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "What happened to Amazon was a world-class system brought to a halt simply because of too many users and the system fell over. That is something that Oracle is just better at handling (when it's administered right and has some powerful hardware at work, which Amazon has in spades for anything they stand up)."

    You seem to have not read the articles about Prime day, such as:

    https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/19/amazon-internal-documents-what-caused-prime-day-crash-company-scramble.html

    Sable is:
    - Is not an RDBMS
    - Is not AWS technology and not used by AWS directly AFAIK
    - Was apparently not scaled up (on their EC2 instances) sufficiently for new (since prwvious peak loads) amazon.com features that use Sable

    Oracle databases cause many outages in Amazon every year; many internal systems that rely on Amazon have either been replaced with new systems that were designed for scalable services AWS offers (and are now much more responsive and can offer modern features, and arw morw stable), or are being migrated off Oracle because it's impossibly expensive to scale Oracle.

    Many amazon.com teams have a lot of experience with Oracle and there is good tooling inside Amazon (that you don't get with Oracle btw.), for momitoring Oracle. The teams in question may just not have that much experience with Aurora/Postgresql, and their own tools and dashboards may not have been updated sufficiently after switching to be able to mitigate as easily as before.

    This doesn't necessarily imply that Aurora is worse than Oracle in any way, it's just dufferent.

    The article here comes across like saying Mac OS is worse than Windows because Outlook on Mac OS doesn't have Auto-Archive.