The Under-Discussed Database Market Gives SO MUCH POWER to AWS

1. BGBen Gilbert0:00

   There's two properties of the database market people just don't think about but are incredible. One, the global market size for database software is one hundred billion dollars, and it is growing at ten percent per year. Because everything you do with computing, you need to store it in a database. You need databases, and you can't get away from them. It's big, and it's growing fast. Two, database software may be the stickiest software of all time.

2. DRDavid Rosenthal0:30

   Especially at the scale that people are producing data now. It's actually worth contextualizing this a little bit. So there's all these stats all the time, which are something like last year, more data was produced and stored than in the entire decade before and in the entire century before that. And that's not the exact stat, but there's eleven different variants of it, which we all sort of intuitively know because we're storing data on our phones. But when you have two things exponentially growing, it's hard to intuit the difference between those two things. And so we sort of know this about data. We also know this about the internet. Like when you talk about dial-up back in the day, and then when people got their first cable or T-One line, and meanwhile, I'm here podcasting, and David, I am seeing you in gigabit down directly into my computer, and it's unbelievable. So you think, "Wow, these two things have the same phenomena," except that they're actually moving at very different rates. The internet has not gotten faster at the rate that data storage has increased. So this is most illustrated in some of the AWS re:Invent talks. They're like, "Hey, a lot of you wanna shift to the cloud, but you have a petabyte of data, or some of you have an exabyte of data in your data center. So what do we do about that?" And they first released this thing that was a hundred-terabyte super secure thing they would ship to your office called the Snowball, and you'd plug it in. It would automatically get all your data. It had a Kindle on it, so it would actually display a custom shipping thing, and you could track it all the way back, and it would arrive in the Amazon data center, and they would auto... It was like tamper-proof, bulletproof. It was the amazing thing. And they've released a few other generations of them now. There's even some with compute on them for field applications. And then the curves kept going. The internet kept getting a little bit faster, but our data storage kept getting a lot more significant. And there's some stat that Andy gives on stage in a keynote in twenty sixteen, seventeen, somewhere in there, where they announce Amazon Snowmobile. And he's like, "Hey," 'cause all of us are sitting here on computers that have a terabyte or two terabytes or four-terabyte hard drive. You're like, "A hundred terabytes is not that meaningful." And so then they're like, "We will send a Snowmobile to your data center," which is a semi-truck full of Snowballs, effectively, so that you can get the data to us. And even with this solution, this never underestimate the bandwidth of a semi-truck moving down the highway, this type of solution, it can still take six months to migrate all of your data into the cloud, whereas it would have taken you years and years and years and years, I don't know, the better part of a century to actually upload it over the wide area network, over the internet. And so that, I think, illustrates pretty heavily your point about once you decide to put all of your enterprise data into a database hosted in some specific vendor's cloud, there's pretty meaningful lock-in there. There are very practical concerns with moving.

3. BGBen Gilbert3:29

   Oh, I can do you one better on an example. Amazon.com used Oracle databases-

4. DRDavid Rosenthal3:35

   Yep

5. BGBen Gilbert3:36

   ... when it was started. Amazon.com did not finish their migration off of Oracle databases and onto AWS products until twenty nineteen. [laughing]

6. DRDavid Rosenthal3:48

   Oh my God.

7. BGBen Gilbert3:49

   Thirteen years after AWS launched.

8. DRDavid Rosenthal3:52

   That is insane.

9. BGBen Gilbert3:53

   It took that long for Amazon itself to migrate off of Oracle.

10. DRDavid Rosenthal3:58

    Meanwhile, by that point, Amazon had eight different database solutions for other companies to use and had invented three of them. There's open source ones they host for you, but they also created DynamoDB, and they invented new database technologies that are compatible with other relational databases, but way faster, way more performant, and it's still hard to migrate within the company.

11. BGBen Gilbert4:22

    Amazing. You know, you just play that forward, and you're like, "Wow, okay, A, there's still so much revenue that's gonna shift to AWS, and B, it's gonna be so sticky. So sticky."

12. SPSpeaker4:36

    [singing] Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down. Say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth? Who got the truth? Now, hmm.

Episode duration: 4:57