Shutterfly moved metadata from over 10 billion sets of photos from a private data center to a public cloud in 2016.



They looked at various cloud service providers and finally chose AWS. Shutterfly used Oracle tools for years to store and manage photo libraries of over 20 million active customers. As the company grew and expanded, they began switching their systems to Amazon cloud services, citing the need to transfer their database to "an easier-to-use system." After assessing different options, Shutterfly revealed that Oracle systems "no longer meet the company's requirements in order to have the necessary level of flexibility."

Data migration is vital in today's digital reality as it involves transferring data from one storage system to another, as shown by ATD and Mythical Games who turned to MongoDB and CockroachDB respectively. Cloud technology has been an industry game-changer since it emerged in the mid-1990s and gained popularity in the 2000s. The top three providers of public cloud services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, have accelerated the adoption of cloud technologies, offering companies ease of scaling, organizational flexibility, fault tolerance, and lowering web hosting costs.

As we speak, the competition between Oracle and cloud service providers is only getting fiercer. Enterprises prefer newer vendors such as MongoDB, Databricks and Snowflake, and are migrating from Oracle during the growth of cloud service providers. Cloud service providers provide companies with a wide range of proprietary tools, which greatly simplifies the implementation of their technologies and saves on hiring well-trained technical staff needed to support Oracle tools.

JPMorgan & Chase has selected CockroachDB as its database provider for its new banking services application in Europe, and Nasdaq is partnering with Databricks and AWS to update Oracle's local data repositories. Firms such as JetBlue Airways and Automatic Data Processing use Snowflake, while the DB offerings of cloud web service providers Azure and Google Cloud are rapidly growing along with Amazon Web Services. Such examples indicate that companies are quickly reducing their interaction with Oracle as good alternatives have emerged.

The emergence of the cloud has given enterprises the opportunity to abandon outdated software suppliers and use more specialized systems. This together with fundamental changes in the industry threaten Oracle's leadership status that it has held since the creation of the first relational database over 43 years ago. The market value of the database industry is estimated at $155 billion on average.

According to Gartner, Oracle's market share fell from 28% in 2019 to 24% in 2021, while Amazon's increased from 16% to nearly 22%. Sales in MongoDB increased by 57% to $285 million in the last quarter, indicating that enterprises are using MongoDB for more extensive projects. Despite this trend, many companies remain content with Oracle products since the company offers reliable technology, and investing in new technologies is a risk.

Oracle still gets a significant portion of its profits from existing customers. However, some enterprises move from Oracle to the cloud because of better options. Nevertheless, the company continues to grow. Oracle's revenue growth is driven by continuous efforts to attract more of the company's customers to the cloud. Its cloud infrastructure sales increased by 36% in the quarter compared to last year, and the company recently completed a deal to acquire electronic medical records provider Cerner Corp. for $28.3 billion, paving the way for further expansion in the healthcare industry.

The focus is not on Oracle, but on comparing Cloud vs On-Prem, and RDBMS vs other data storage options. The problem does not lie in storage location, format, or structure, but in the competence of architects and developers who can be disoriented by hype solutions and an abundance of options. Fashionable and rational solutions have existed throughout time, such as object-oriented databases in the 90s, NoSQL in the 00s, and Cloud DB and Serverless DB in the 10s. Changing the front-end or logic is possible, but the base remains unchanged since it is the foundation. While on-premise data storage may no longer be in fashion, choosing the appropriate foundation for each task requires careful consideration. As a professional who has been working with databases since 1993, it is crucial to understand all data storage options and select the most suitable one.

Oracle need not fear cloud solutions, but rather PostgreSQL, as many migrate to it, which is also partly a "cloud" option. Along with PostgreSQL, there are other decentralized and computing options on the blockchain, such as Ethernity Cloud with the native ETNY token.
The development team behind it seems very innovative and ambitious, aiming to compete with Amazon and Microsoft in the cloud computing market.