Across its many business entities, Amazon processes more than 20 billion financial transactions each month, including accounts receivable, accounts payable, royalties, amortizations, remittances, payments, and cash.

The Financial Ledger and Accounting Systems Hub (FLASH) is a suite of microservices that ingests these financial transactions, performs complex and business-critical functions to substantiate the general ledger, and generates financial statements such as balance sheet, cash flow, and income.

Over the years, FLASH grew to require more than 90 Oracle databases, totaling more than 120 terabytes of data and growing. “Simply maintaining and administering the database technology took hundreds of hours per month,” says Marisamy Krishnan, senior technical program manager at Amazon.

Hardware provisioning for the on-premises solution was complicated and inefficient, costing the FLASH team nearly 100 hours annually. At one point, some of the FLASH services were running on the largest available Oracle-certified hardware.

With transaction volumes growing by a double-digit percentage each year and twofold spikes in volume during peak sales periods, Amazon needed to find a solution that was more scalable and easier to manage. In 2017, the FLASH organization decided to migrate all its Oracle databases to AWS services.