During the recent re:Invent conference, AWS announced that Amazon RDS now offers support for IBM Db2, including both the Standard Edition and Advanced Edition. Db2 becomes the sixth engine supported by this managed database service, joining PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQL Server, and Oracle.
In a surprising legacy database commitment, RDS now supports Db2 v11.5.9 for Linux, Unix, and Windows (LUW) but not Db2 for z/OS mainframe. Jeff Barr, vice president and chief evangelist at AWS, writes:
You get the ease of use of Amazon RDS (no hardware provisioning, installation, patching, or hardware maintenance) and the deep, comprehensive set of relational database features offered by IBM's pioneering Db2, including your choice of Standard and Advanced editions, all with on-demand pricing.
Designed for large-scale transactional and analytical workloads, IBM Db2 is a relational database widely utilized across various industries, including financial services, the public sector, healthcare, and manufacturing. Although RDS for Db2 currently supports only version 11.5, customers running version 11.1 can migrate by running backup and restore procedures from a snapshot to a new RDS instance.
Support for IBM Db2 on RDS shows the cloud provider's commitment to facilitating the lift and shift of legacy and enterprise deployments to AWS. Sébastien Stormacq, principal developer advocate at AWS, provides guidance on creating and running a Db2 instance using a sample dataset and script available on the Db2Tutorial website. He highlights:
Db2 has its roots in the pioneering work around data storage and SQL IBM has done since the 1970s. It has been commercially available since 1983, initially just for mainframes, and was later ported to Linux, Unix, and Windows platforms (LUW).
As for the documentation, RDS for Db2 requires customers to bring their licenses and enter an IBM customer ID and site number before starting an instance. In their press release, IBM adds:
As Amazon RDS for Db2 customers accelerate their modernization and AI initiatives, they will be able to leverage an array of IBM's integrated data and AI capabilities on AWS to manage data and scale AI workloads.
The response of the community has been mixed, with Guillaume Clement writing:
There are folks running COBOL in Lambda, so why not...
Keith Townsend, president at CTO Advisor LLC, comments instead:
This is actually a big deal if you care about dealing with technical debt and making enterprises' jobs of modernization less difficult.
Besides native Db2 tools, the engine supports the standard Db2 client package and is now available in all AWS regions except China and GovCloud. In a separate announcement, AWS Database Migration Service has added Db2 to the supported target endpoints, simplifying the migration for self-managed workloads to AWS.
The pricing page indicates that the cost of an instance is slightly higher than that of open-source engines. Additionally, the Db2 licensing fees are not included in the price under the BYOL model.
The re:Invent session about the new service is now available on YouTube.