Ancestry is Moving its Genealogy Data to AWS



Ancestry.com, one of the largest genealogy websites, is moving 10 petabytes of genealogy data to AWS. The move has already started. It appears that this collaboration will be beneficial for both companies.

Ancestry currently manages about 10 petabytes of structured and unstructured data that was generated by more than 2.6 million subscribers. The data includes 20 billion historical records detailing births, marriages, deaths, military service, and immigration. An average of more than 75 million searches are handled by Ancestry servers daily.

According to Enterprise Tech, (in an article from 2014), Ancestry had two data centers. One was located in Salt Lake City, Utah. The other was located in Denver, Colorado.

ZD Net reported that Ancestry’s Salt Lake City data center is going to be decommissioned soon. As such, the migration of 10 petabytes of data from that data center, to AWS, has taken place over the last six months. Ancestry moved some of its biggest services (images, search, and analytics) first. Ancestry is in the process of moving 550 databases and 500 services to AWS.

AWS stands for Amazon Web Services, which offers cloud computing. Cloud computing is an on-demand delivery of compute power, database storage, applications, and other IT resources through a cloud services platform via the internet.

Cloud computing provides a simple way to access servers, storage, databases, and a broad set of application services over the internet. A Cloud services platform such as Amazon Web Services owns and maintains the network-connected hardware required for these application services. Companies with data at AWS can provision and use what they need via a web application.

Venture Beat pointed out that Ancestry benefits from moving its massive amount of genealogy data to AWS. Doing so gives Ancestry a set of services and infrastructure that can scale to meet is business needs as the company continues to grow. Ancestry has a rapidly growing DNA sequencing offering that requires processing a ton of data.

AWS benefits by having Ancestry as one of its customers. AWS competes for customers with Microsoft, Google, and IBM. Ancestry has committed to storing its data with AWS, and that means recurring revenue for Amazon.

Related Articles at FamilyTree.com:

* Ancestry Clarifies What They Do with Your DNA

* AncestryDNA Introduces Genetic Communities

* Ancestry and Software MacKiev Introduce FamilySync

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