It’s been two years in the making but small business cloud accounting software company Xero has finally finished its data migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is one of the largest data migrations to the public cloud platform across Australia and New Zealand. Here are the details.
The migration took over two years to architect and execute. It involved over 59 billion records, 3000 apps and 120 databases moving onto the AWS platform. This gives Xero the ability to scale its accounting platform as its customer base grows, reduce cost of infrastructure ownership and allow for faster software deployment times.
Another big reason the company wanted to migrate to AWS was because it’s keen to leverage machine learning for its future operations:
“The migration to AWS sets Xero up to accelerate innovation and capitalise on machine learning, which Xero believes will redefine accounting in future years. The smart application of machine learning technology enables Xero to leverage the more than 1.4 petabytes of data, which is the equivalent of about 60,000 Blu-Ray movies, being stored and do something powerful: automate core accounting functionalities and enable business owners to work more efficiently.”
Xero had considered other cloud platforms but went with AWS. Here’s what Xero chief platform officer Duncan Ritchie had to say: “The investment that AWS was doing with their platform solutions was what got us over the line. We did spend a lot of time with Azure and we’ve built many a solution on Microsoft so we’re familiar with the software. But, at the time it was a proven solution and we felt it was a good fit for us.”
Xero currently has around 862,000 subscribers and has recorded more than $1 trillion over 450 million incoming and outgoing transactions in the last 12 months.
Comments
5 responses to “Xero Completes Colossal Data Migration To AWS”
Would anyone know the reason why they went to Amazon instead of the others? They all pretty much have AI or machine learning so I wonder what other reasons
I’m chasing that up now. Will update if I get an answer! 🙂
Updated article with the answer. 🙂
The answer if you are referring to the second last paragraph was kind of a non answer.
True, but that’s all I got from them. Still worth putting it in the article.