Use Case: Capital One — Sybase to AWS Migration

Use Case  ·  Financial Services  ·  Database Migration

How Capital One migrated 32 Sybase servers
to AWS with near-zero downtime

A mission-critical platform transformation spanning 24 database servers, 8 replication servers, and a full data warehouse redesign — completed without disrupting production operations.

24
DB servers
migrated
8
Replication
servers replaced
<5min
Planned downtime
per cutover
3×
Query performance
on Redshift

The challenge

Capital One operated one of the largest Sybase deployments in U.S. financial services — a sprawling estate of 24 ASE database servers and 8 Replication Server instances handling mission-critical transactional workloads, plus a Sybase IQ data warehouse serving regulatory reporting and business intelligence.

Aging infrastructure, rising licensing costs, and limited cloud elasticity made modernization urgent. But as a top-10 U.S. bank, zero tolerance for production disruption made the migration exceptionally high-stakes.

Industry

Financial Services — Top-10 U.S. Bank

Source platform

Sybase ASE Sybase IQ Sybase Replication Server

Target platform

Amazon RDS Amazon Aurora Amazon Redshift AWS DMS Amazon Kinesis

Hybrid migration approach

01

Lift & Shift

Direct migration of Sybase ASE workloads to AWS EC2, preserving existing schema and code to minimize risk for time-sensitive systems.

12 servers migrated in the initial wave

02

Replatform

Selective transformation to AWS-native services using AWS SCT and DMS, with custom scripting for Sybase-specific syntax conversion.

10 servers replatformed to RDS / Aurora

03

Decommission

Retirement of legacy databases with no active consumers, including S3 archival, compliance review, and controlled sign-off.

2 servers decommissioned, costs eliminated

Data warehouse redesign

The Sybase IQ analytical platform was fully redesigned on Amazon Redshift — including schema redesign, ETL pipeline rebuild using AWS Glue, and BI tool recertification across Tableau and Business Objects. The result: 3× query performance improvement over the Sybase IQ baseline, with automated backups and elastic scaling.

All 8 Sybase Replication Servers were replaced with AWS DMS continuous replication and Amazon Kinesis Data Streams — maintaining full data consistency throughout every cutover window, with zero replication lag incidents recorded.

Results

100% of 32 Sybase servers migrated or decommissioned on schedule
Near-zero downtime — no P1/P2 incidents attributed to migration
Sybase licensing costs fully eliminated
PCI-DSS and SOX compliance maintained throughout
3× analytics performance improvement on Redshift
Full runbook documentation handed to Capital One’s team

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