For some time, AWS has offered managed relational databases (RDS) for MySQL, SQLServer, Oracle, and Postgres deployments. Now, after some months in preview, Amazon has officially launched the full version of their own AWS Aurora database.
In general, Amazon’s RDS handles administration, backups, and snapshots, leaving you to worry about your data. You can easily scale your compute and storage resources to fit your evolving needs. As with all AWS managed services, RDS is highly available and you can use their MultiAZ feature to synchronously replicate data to a standby instance in a different availability zone.
You can access these databases through the AWS Management Console, the command line tool, and API calls.
AWS Aurora was built to deliver significantly improved parallel processing and concurrent I/O operations. In traditional database engine architectures (like Mysql, MSSQL, and Oracle), all layers of data functionality – like SQL, transactions, caching, and logging – reside in the single box.
But when you provision Amazon Aurora, logging and caching are moved into a “multi-tenant, scale-out database-optimized storage service” that’s deeply integrated with other AWS compute and storage services. Besides allowing you to dramatically scale without nearly the overhead, you can restart the database engine without losing the cache.
Here’s Amazon’s own feature-by-feature comparison of RDS MySQL and Aurora:
As of now, Amazon Aurora is only available for instances starting with dbr3.large (2vCPU/15GB). This means that the option is effectively not available for smaller instances. Aurora only supports InnoDB, and when you migrate from MySQL, MYISAM tables are automatically converted to InnoDB.
Keeping in all this in mind, while Aurora is now publicly available, you’re certainly free to start playing around with it as part of a test or POC environment. As you gain experience, you’ll see some of the platform’s advantages and limitations for yourself. You might also want to browse through the testimonials of other AWS customers who are already deeply involved in their own explorations.
Learn more about Aurora, and how to deploy, load, query, monitor, and failover a multiple Availability Zone (AZ) Aurora database in Cloud Academy’s Getting started with Amazon Aurora database engine hands-on lab.
It's Flash Sale time! Get 50% off your first year with Cloud Academy: all access to AWS, Azure, and Cloud…
In this blog post, we're going to answer some questions you might have about the new AWS Certified Data Engineer…
This is my 3rd and final post of this series ‘Navigating the Vocabulary of Gen AI’. If you would like…