Nubank migrates 100+ apps to Amazon RDS for Oracle for up to 50% lower latency

Nubank delivers banking and financial services in Latin America, serving over 60 percent of all Brazilian adults. Tens of millions of people have used Nubank to access formal financial services—such as a credit card or financing—for the first time.

Nubank was built on the cloud, using AWS as its primary cloud provider to deliver resilient, low-latency services to customers at scale. However, while most Nubank systems and teams used AWS, the Global Investments business unit maintained an Oracle Exadata environment inherited through an acquisition. Global Investments ran SINACOR—the brokerage management application for Brazil’s stock exchange—in this Exadata environment. The company had to manage different stacks with separate monitoring, access, and change management tools across two cloud environments. “The multicloud arrangement made it harder to enforce unified governance and security controls, guarantee consistent performance, or plan a long-term architecture as our environment expanded,” says Yukio Akazawa, senior engineering manager at Nubank.

Nubank looked to simplify its environment by migrating its Oracle workloads to AWS. Alongside Cintra, an AWS Partner with experience in complex Oracle migrations, Nubank created a proof of concept to validate running SINACOR on Amazon RDS. “The proof of concept demonstrated that Amazon RDS for Oracle could meet or exceed our performance needs while giving us a fully managed service aligned with our AWS operating model,” says Felipe Torres, engineering director at Nubank. “We also evaluated the broader benefits—security, scalability, cost optimization, and operational simplicity—and concluded that Amazon RDS for Oracle was the best fit.”

Following the successful proof of concept, Nubank began migrating its 36 TB Global Investments database to Amazon RDS for Oracle. The company used a phased migration approach, running parallel environments to prevent downtime and data loss for the critical database. Nubank took advantage of the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (AWS MAP), a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program, to help offset the temporary costs of running two environments.

The database cutover was completed on schedule without impacting customers. Nubank received dedicated support through AWS Countdown Premium, which provides expert engineering support for migrations, high-impact launches, and peak events on AWS. This support included a thorough operational readiness review prior to the migration. The team conducted application mapping, dependency analysis, premigration testing, and a risk management framework that considered all possible failure scenarios and corresponding mitigation actions. “By investing in proofs of concept, dry runs, disaster recovery tests, and detailed runbooks, the actual cutover felt like running a well-practiced play rather than a one-off risk,” says Akazawa. “The proactive, continuous support from AWS Countdown Premium was a key factor in completing the cutover on schedule with near-zero downtime.”

On Amazon RDS, Nubank can now use the same identity access management, network segmentation, encryption, and logging standards across its AWS environment. This lowers costs and streamlines operations by providing users with consistent configurations. Amazon RDS for Oracle also supports Nubank’s mandatory reports, making it simpler to demonstrate compliance and pass audits. It also provides robust disaster recovery and failover capabilities. Nubank benefits from managed features, such as Amazon RDS read replicas and Amazon RDS multi-AZ deployments, which provide enhanced availability and durability. “Amazon RDS multi-AZ deployments deliver the resilience and fault tolerance that our regulated investments solution requires, giving us the reliability that our customers expect,” says Torres.

By migrating to Amazon RDS for Oracle, Nubank reduced database latency by up to 50 percent for more than 100 apps. “In a high-volume environment like Nubank, every millisecond counts,” says Akazawa. The team achieved lower latency by adjusting and tuning queries to improve performance and by deploying the application environment in the same place as the database environment on AWS. For the main customer-facing applications that rely on this database, SINACOR processing times are now an average of 40 percent faster. Amazon RDS for Oracle provided Nubank with database backups that run 40 percent faster than its previous environment with improved data compression and process optimization, accelerating backup generation and improving its disaster recovery posture. The migration also reduced costs, with double-digit percentage improvements of total cost of ownership.

The unified environment on AWS simplified governance and reduced the fragmentation of maintaining two monitoring stacks. Now, the Nubank team has more time to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure maintenance, and employees report higher satisfaction and confidence in the new architecture.

Nubank will continue to modernize legacy workloads using AWS managed services and expand data and AI solutions on AWS. “We are excited about the opportunity to keep expanding financial access and innovation at scale using a modern cloud as the foundation,” says Torres. “Successfully migrating such a critical workload to Amazon RDS for Oracle reinforces that we can safely carry out ambitious transformations while protecting customer trust and regulatory obligations.”