Novus Partners, the makers of a portfolio analytics and intelligence platform for institutional investors, operated its own datacenter for many years to deliver its Novus solution to capital allocators and managers throughout the world. But with steep licensing costs—at $400,000 per year—combined with an aging, 20-blade, on-premises database server cluster and a push to modernize the company’s technology stack, the Novus IT team sought a cloud-based alternative that delivered cost savings, scalability, performance, and manageability, and laid the groundwork for agile development. Novus worked with Datavail to migrate its commercial on-premises database to two instances of Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) MySQL on Amazon Web Services (AWS), cutting costs by 50 percent and relieving developers from operations work so they could ship more product features than ever before.