Amazon Web Services Launches Aurora Database Engine

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released Aurora, a MySQL-compatible database engine that effectively increases the performance of Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS).

Aurora has been in preview since last November, using almost 1,000 customers as guinea pigs. This week, AWS announced the platform’s general availability.

‘One-tenth the cost’

The preview customers, which ranged from startups to global enterprises including WeTransfer, NASDAQ and Earth Networks, reportedly experienced up to five times better performance than a typical MySQL database with Aurora, and availability that is “as good or better” than commercial databases at one-tenth the cost.

“Today’s commercial-grade databases are expensive, proprietary, high lock-in, and come with punitive licensing terms that these database providers are comfortable employing,” scorned Raju Gulabani, vice president, Database Services, AWS.

“It’s why we rarely meet enterprises who aren’t looking to escape from their commercial-grade database solution. Now, with Amazon Aurora, companies can get at least the same availability, durability, and security as commercial-grade databases for one-tenth of the cost.”

So let’s look at some figures that start to back up what AWS is claiming, then. At the November announcement, Amazon claimed Aurora could command 6 million inserts per minute, and 30 million selects per minute. Offering the platform as part of its own product portfolio is yet another feather in AWS’ cap, enabling customers to keep the cost down somewhat whilst powering its $6 billion public cloud behemoth.

Amazon said that Aurora automatically replicates data across multiple Availability Zones and continuously backs up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Aurora is designed to offer greater than 99.99 percent availability and automatically detect and recover from most database failures in less than 60 seconds, without crash recovery or the need to rebuild database caches. The service also continually monitors instance health and if there is a failure, it will automatically failover to a read replica without loss of data.

Aurora is now available in the US East, US West, and EU regions, expanding to the reminijng regions in the next few months.

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