RecoChoku began using cloud solutions in around 2013 in order to have a flexible infrastructure that was also highly scalable. It began by migrating the service infrastructure system it developed and built on premises to AWS. "After looking at a number of cloud services, AWS was head and shoulders above the rest in terms of the number of services and the speed of developing new services," says Sakai.

RecoChoku decided to shift its entire IT infrastructure to AWS, first migrating the existing on-premises system to an environment centered around services such as Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, and Amazon RDS. In the initial stages of migration, a hybrid environment integrating the on-premises system was used.

After migrating a number of services to AWS and confirming it offered sufficient stability and flexibility, newly launched services are now being developed in the AWS environment. In each case, RecoChoku has proactively introduced services that systems personnel deemed necessary, and over 30 AWS services are now being used.

One challenge RecoChoku faced during the move to AWS was the migration of the membership database system that manages customer information. The management of customer information is a crucial part of business, requiring a system with high reliability and availability. For this reason, RecoChoku had been running a database system with a configuration that combined Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). To convert this system to AWS, RecoChoku initially considered methods for installing Oracle Database on Amazon EC2 or utilizing Amazon RDS for Oracle. "For these methods we had to consider how to secure high availability, and how much the change would cost. As we were going to the trouble of performing this migration, we also wanted to select a system that would enable us to let AWS handle the operation and management that the previous infrastructure had required," says Sakai.

RecoChoku selected Amazon Aurora to overcome these issues. "The membership system manages around 10 million sets of user information, covering eight years of operation. Because we adopted a method involving migration from Oracle to MySQL, we first spent about a month tuning the system to absorb SQL differences and ensure sufficient performance on Amazon Aurora," explains Sakai.

RecoChoku then migrated the data, completing the migration from Oracle RAC to Amazon Aurora in a total of about three months after a test period of concurrent operation.

With the migration of the database for its membership system to Amazon Aurora, RecoChoku completed migration of its core systems to AWS, and migration of all remaining systems is scheduled to be complete in March 2017.