Amazon Database Migration Service – an easy solution for database migration

Flashnode Oy is an IT company whose mission is to make everyday life easier for entrepreneurs by offering them system integrations. Integration combines the company’s existing, familiar software and automates the transfer of data between them. This significantly reduces the amount of manual routine work.

When Flashnode was being founded, the team and founding members were frustrated with how slow and complicated integration projects were. "There must be an easier way of doing this!" was the guiding principle when the team started to develop the integration platform that would make integrations more manageable and scalable.

There must be an easy way of doing database migrations!

Database migration refers to the transfer of data from one database to another without compromising data integrity, so that the data remains reliable and in its original, usable format. Due to the complexity of this process, many things can go wrong during migration. All those who have done database migrations can say the same: "There must be an easier way of doing this!"

Modernisation of AWS infrastructure

As Flashnode’s business has grown, the use of integration environment services has also increased. This means that the data used requires more capacity, which, in turn, increases the load. The containerised databases and several EC2 instances in Flashnode’s integration environment made the maintenance and support of the service environment more complicated. The increased load on services led to an AWS infrastructure modernisation project with Skillwell.

In late 2020, Skillwell carried out the database migration for Flashnode’s integration environment with the aid of Amazon Database Migration Service (DMS). DMS was used to combine and migrate the content of the databases to a single Amazon Aurora cluster. At the same time, Cloud Formation platform templates were introduced and the architecture of the customer environment was improved.

Benefits of modernisation

The modernisation project was easy for Flashnode – Skillwell took care of the entire process. Flashnode started to use a single Multi-AZ Amazon Aurora cluster instead of multiple containerised EC2 instances; database data was migrated from multiple sources to a single database cluster. Benefits of modernisation for Flashnode:

Implemented CloudFormation templates improve maintenance
Quick and effective reproduction of the environment
Improved resilience
Improved usability
Reduced maintenance costs in relation to use and support tasks

The end result, which was also confirmed by Flashnode’s specialists, was that database migrations can be carried out easily and reliably by using Amazon Database Migration Service. Flashnode’s CTO Aleksi Kallio commented the change: "Even though we knew that DMS was a valid tool for migrations, we were still pleasantly surprised by its ease of use and reliability."

With the aid of DMS, you can carry out cloud migrations for databases in both data centres and the cloud.