AWS Database Migration Service Reviews & Insights

We have two use cases for AWS Database Migration Service.

• AWS Database Migration Service is used to replicate certain critical data relationships between the production and lower environment databases. The business problem is keeping data consistency between the environments. An example is an equipment association with job sites. Equipment moves between job sites and those associations have to be updated.
• We use AWS Database Migration Service to populate our lower environment databases with production-like data. AWS Database Migration Service replicates and transforms production data into our dev and QA databases. In so doing, AWS Database Migration Service provides production-like data for our engineering and QA teams. It does not work too well for this purpose. The task and mapping settings are limited so we end up having to manually de-duplicate data which prevents this from being a continual and near real-time process. AWS Database Migration Service helps with the initial replication but because we have to do many manual tasks it's not ideal. Our schema design contributes to this and had we considered replication our experience may have been better.

As stated previously, AWS Database Migration Service excels when replicating very specific data elements between environments. AWS Database Migration Service handles replication tasks to load equipment assets or customer job sites from production to QA databases very well.

Full load replication - e.g., we need an exact copy of the production database in another region - works well. But when we need to load the QA database with the latest production data - it does work as well. AWS Database Migration Service comes up short because we do not want to wipe the QA database completely and make an exact copy. We want to keep what's already in the QA database and add production data so that we can QA with that level of volume. And at least with our database design, we end up having to do a lot of manual data manipulation and de-duplication.