Amazon Web Services has seen more than 16,000 migrations of databases off private data centers since the launch of its migration service last March.

That’s according to a tweet from AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy about the company’s Database Migration Service. Of those migrations, Jassy reckons more than 2,000 have taken place since the end of AWS’s re:Invent conference in November. First announced back in October 2015, DMS was intended to help users of Oracle, SQL Server MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL databases easily migrate their workloads onto the AWS cloud, with virtually no downtime involved.

Here’s Jassy’s tweet:

16K database migrations via AWS Database Migration Service in 2016…2K in last month since #AWS #Reinvent. DB freedom is a powerful thing.

— Andy Jassy (@ajassy) Dec. 31

It’s worth pointing out that Amazon rarely releases many data points about its cloud business, and even the tidbits that it does reveal often cannot be verified. Still, it’s unlikely Jassy would be lying about these particular numbers, suggesting that DMS is now one of AWS’s fastest areas of growth. If so, DMS is perhaps approaching the growth of Amazon’s Redshift data warehouse service, which the company said last year was the fastest-growing service in AWS’s then nine-year history.

But while it’s likely true that some of Amazon’s DMS customers have been able to save money by migrating away from expensive Oracle and SQL Server databases, “freedom” can be relative. There’s no guarantee they won’t end up finding themselves shackled to Amazon’s cloud later on down the line, because data is still costly and time-consuming to move.

Andy Jassy appeared as a guest on SiliconANGLE’s event coverage show theCUBE during the re:Invent conference:

Photo by SiliconANGLE