Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), was a leader in Gartner Inc.’s most recent ranking of operational DBMS vendors.
Gartner defines operational DBMS (database Management Systems) as a combination of relational and non-relational database management products that can be used for a variety enterprise-level transactional applications such as ERP, CRM, security event management, and catalog management. A DBMS is a complete software system that can create, manage, update, query, and manage a database.
Gartner’s October Magic Quadrant report shows that AWS trails Oracle and Microsoft in the Ability to Execute evaluation. However, it trails IBM and SAP in its Completeness of Vision ranking.
Gartner evaluated the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) for Aurora, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL, Oracle, and PostgreSQL, as well as Amazon DynamoDB (a NoSQL file and key-value DBMS).
Gartner’s “vendor strengths & cautions” analysis stated that AWS offers a wide range product capabilities, including relational and NoSQL technologies. It continues to develop new products to meet and exceed market demands.”
It was also highly rated for its geographical availability and ease-of-doing business.
Gartner stated that AWS is based on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud(EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service(S3) and supports 30 availability zones spanning 19 nations and five continents. “While not all services are available in all zones of AWS, AWS’s cloud infrastructure remains one of the most robust, diverse, and stable.”
AWS’s limited capabilities on-premises was the main concern. Gartner stated that AWS’s cloud-based focus has naturally limited its product capabilities to support hybrid cloud deployments for DBMSs. AWS does offer tools and services that can be used to support hybrid deployments. However, customers will need a careful evaluation of their on-premises requirements to ensure that AWS’s hybrid solutions work with their existing assets.
Other warnings include below-average customer ratings for documentation and professional services, as well as performance. However, Gartner stated that the latter evaluation could be partially attributable to customers understanding of cloud environments, and how to best use them.
AWS was outscored by Oracle in the database evaluation. However, Oracle has now launched a direct challenge to Amazon’s cloud service with a host of new cloud services including an Oracle Elastic Compute cloud.
