S&P Dow Jones Indices Improves Database Performance After Modernizing Its Database Environment Using Amazon Aurora

Initially, S&P DJI performed a lift-and-shift migration to hybrid infrastructure using Amazon Web Services (AWS). The company’s near real-time solutions and core index services solution remained on-premises, and it migrated all other databases and its application stack to the cloud. To reduce the time that it spent on database maintenance, S&P DJI replatformed using Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. “The benefits of Amazon RDS include business continuity and high availability,” says Shivakumar Bangalore, senior director of database engineering at S&P Global Inc. “Most of the database administration aspects are taken care of by Amazon RDS.”

After its initial migration, S&P DJI continued to grow and innovate. The company decided to modernize some of its applications by migrating to Amazon Aurora, a relational database management system designed for unparalleled high performance and availability at global scale with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility. One initiative was to migrate some of S&P DJI’s on-premises MySQL databases to the Amazon Aurora MySQL-Compatible Edition. The organization also migrated some of its databases housed in another database service to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL-Compatible Edition. “Our demand for index data services and web services increased, so database performance was a critical need for us,” says Bangalore.

To migrate, S&P DJI used AWS Database Migration Service (AWS DMS), a service for migrating databases with minimal downtime. The organization also used AWS Schema Conversion Tool (AWS SCT), a schema conversion solution to make heterogeneous database migrations predictable, fast, secure, and simple. “We were able to cut our migration time down to 10 hours, so it was a great journey,” says Bangalore.

S&P DJI also built new thematic indices, including indices for new economies, using Amazon Aurora Global Database, which runs globally distributed applications using a single Aurora database that spans multiple AWS Regions. “We used write forwarding so that we could keep the databases active in multiple Regions,” says Bangalore. “Applications could connect to the database in any Region and still be active to perform some of the application functionalities.” The organization also recently went live with a serverless application using Amazon Aurora Serverless—an on-demand, automatic scaling configuration for Aurora—and could use the serverless capability to scale instantly based on dynamic workload, particularly around its machine learning applications, which have the ability to ingest large amounts of data.

By using Aurora to modernize its relational database environment, S&P DJI has achieved greater efficiency through automation and cloud-native capabilities. “After migrating to Aurora, we could increase the efficiency of our operations, our quality of service, and the speed and performance of many of our databases, and also cut down our operational costs significantly,” says Bangalore. Completing a successful journey to the cloud, the company is now equipped to continue modernizing and scaling its applications using a variety of AWS solutions. “This was our beginning-to-end journey to the cloud, but this is just a new beginning,” says Bangalore. “We are going to continue to use many AWS services.”

S&P Dow Jones Indices is a division of S&P Global Inc., an American publicly traded corporation headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1882, the organization provides solutions for tracking market performance, evaluating portfolios, and developing investment strategies. Its indices number in the hundreds of thousands and span every major asset class, as well as markets around the globe.