Every business needs a database to power the app and power their business. As app(s) grow, the database will grow rapidly. With the open source database engines like MySQL and PostgreSQL, it would be very difficult to handle the database grow in a reliable and cost-effective manner. Amazon introduces Amazon Aurora database, which provides commercial database’s performance and reliability at the cost of open source database engine.

What is Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora is Relational database engine by Amazon, which is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Amazon Aurora offers five times better performance than MySQL and high availability with cost-effectiveness. It also provides an enterprise-level capability which includes database monitoring, cloning, cross-region copying & replication of database and database migration service.

Why Amazon Aurora is better solution?

  • Performance:
    Performance of Aurora is almost 5 times better than MySQL and 2 times better than PostgreSQL.
  • Reliability:
    Aurora continuously monitors the health of database instance. On database failure, Aurora restarts the database and related processes. On database crash as well, it automatically recovers/repairs the database.
    It takes up to 15 Aurora Replicas that can be distributed across the Availability Zones that a DB cluster spans within a region.
    It automatically takes backup of the database in Amazon S3 up to 35 days.
  • Security:
    RDS provides network level isolation in which you can define different rules to access database.
    Resource level permission to restrict access
    Amazon Aurora provides encryption facility where all data in database would be encrypted with user-generated keys and controlling through AWS key management system.
  • Scalability:
    Amazon Aurora is managed through Amazon RDS service only. It provides a wide range of selection from 1 vCPU to 32 vCPU with 244 GB of RAM to scale vertically.
    It also provides support of Auto-scaling. So, it automatically grows from 10GB to 64TB as per need for storage capacity.
  • Availability and Durability:

    Amazon Aurora is designed for the highly availability of 99.99%. It keeps six copies of replica in three different time zones which are continuously backed up on Amazon S3.

  • Compatibility:

    As mentioned earlier, Amazon Aurora is fully compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. So, to migrate with Amazon Aurora from MySQL and PostgreSQL won’t require any change in code. Most of the code would be same.

With improvements in reliability and availability, Amazon Aurora can provide a significant performance increase to your application and reduce cost at the same time.