Ancestry Migrating Its Entire Infrastructure To AWS

Talk about a big, big win for AWS! Ancestry, the leading genealogy company, has announced plans to migrate its entire infrastructure to the Amazon Web Services platform.

We’re talking about 10 petabytes of genealogy data here.

That’s more or less 10,000 terabytes of data.

Some 34 years in operation, the company is no stranger to dealing with data at this massive a scale, but with this migration, it has become the latest in line of data-heavy companies that are transitioning their infrastructure and operations to the AWS cloud platform.

In terms of statistics, we are looking at numbers like 10 petabytes of structured an unstructured data that has been generated by more than 2.6 million subscribers. Some 20 billion historical records detailing the births, marriages, deaths, military services and immigration are handled by Ancestry.

Its servers handle more than 75 million searches daily.

The firm is already well into the migration process, and has moved some 8 PB of data thus far. The company plans to migrate a total of 12,000 virtual machines to the cloud, and is also adopting AWS platform services like Redshift for data warehousing and Lambda for just-in-time computations.

According to officials, the company was thinking about a migration as early as 2013, but was concerned about the privacy and security of the highly personal data of its users. Ancestry is satisfied that AWS will be able to provide better protection than a private data center.

The company will soon decommission its data center in Salt Lake City, as it nears the end of its migration, which has taken place over the last six months. It moved its biggest services over first, including images, search and analytics.

Ultimately, this is another massive win for AWS, as the company is locked into a tight competition with other cloud platforms, with providers like Microsoft, Google and IBM into the mix.

This mountain of data will translate to recurring revenue for Amazon, while Ancestry will gain access to a set of services and infrastructure that can scale to meet its business needs.