AWS goes after Microsoft SQL Server
Migrations just got easier
At Amazon’s re:Invent keynote in late 2020, Amazon Web Services(AWS) CEO Andy Jassy announced a new service called Babelfish with the tag line: “Stop paying for SQL Server licenses you don’t need”. Babelfish is a translation layer for applications written for SQL to now switch over to AWS Aurora PostgreSQL without having to refactor any of the underlying code. AWS was already in competition with Microsoft Azure, but AWS failed to have something as popular among developers as Microsoft’s SQL has been. This is clearly Amazon taking a shot at Microsoft while lowering the barrier to entry for companies to switch to their service.
Why it matters
In today’s fight for cloud storage, Amazon is making a new type of value proposition to its customers. “Stop paying for SQL Server licenses you don’t need” is a direct call to action to the hold-out legacy users that insist on maintaining their own SQL Servers or have been walled into using Microsoft Azure. Amazon is removing a barrier to entry that was causing some to hold out on converting to their service.
But by customers making this conversion to use AWS, what are they really giving up? While pricing might be affordable for companies now, what happens in the future if Amazon hikes up prices? Getting stuck in this “walled garden” could be a strong deterrent for some customers. The hope is that this will help customers slowly migrate to using PostgreSQL natively over time. With Babelfish you can do this incrementally by having a translation layer handle the old code while you write the new code.
The name Babelfish is a reference to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where a fish could translate any language for you.
Open Source
Yet Amazon did something different here that they didn’t really have to do. They announced that this project will be available under the Apache 2.0 license for the open-source community to use. While still in preview now, being open source means that there will be more interesting updates to the software as time goes on. This is a shift in how big tech companies have handled projects like this in the past. Very few have been successful as open-source projects. I think Babelfish just might do it.
We invite others to become active in the project, and we will see it as a sign of success when developers outside of AWS become committers or maintainers. You can help by adding or extending Babelfish functionality, submitting feature requests, working on documentation, and contributing test cases. [1]
Conclusion
As someone who has used SQL server and AWS before I think the two were always a clunky experience before. It was certainly possible to run your SQL server in AWS, but you lost out on some of the cool stuff that Amazon was doing with PostgreSQL. Before it was hard to see how to scale with using SQL Server on AWS without incurring significant costs, and now it seems like it would be significantly easier and cheaper. Especially because there would be no need to purchase a license from Microsoft for SQL or waste time refactoring legacy code. The project still hasn’t been released yet, but when it does I think AWS will start to see customers show interest. Hopefully, this will incentivize Amazon (and other companies) to open source more tools in the future.
The open-source Babelfish project will launch in 2021 and will be available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. Leave a comment of your other favorite Open Source projects!
