Amazon Aurora, a cloud-based relational database, brings together the benefits of a traditional onsite database with that of an open-sourced database.
Amazon Aurora features faster speeds than a regular MySQL or PostgreSQL database, while remaining compatible with both. It has the same level of security, reliability, and availability that commercial databases have at a far lower cost.
Being fully-managed and automated, Aurora handles mundane tasks that would take up much of your time: resource provisioning, configuration, updates, and backups. When required, Aurora can automatically scale up to 64 TB for each instance. It is distributed, self-healing, fault-tolerant, provides point-in-time recover, backs up to Amazon S3 continuously, and can replicate across three Availability Zones.
You can migrate your onsite MySQL or PostgreSQL database to your very own Aurora database today.
Why Use Amazon Aurora?
Faster Speeds and Greater Scalability
Amazon Aurora features speeds that are up to 500% faster than a MySQL database, and 300% faster than a standard PostgreSQL database while remaining compatible with both. It has the same level of security, reliability, and availability that commercial databases have, only at 10% of their cost. You can choose to manually or automatically also easily scale up or down between small and large instance types.
High Levels of Availability and Seal-Healing
Amazon Aurora guarantees 99.99% availability, with six database backups spread across three Availability Zones for added safety. It backs up data continuously to S3, recovers automatically from physical failures typically within a minute, and lets users recover to a point in time in case of users errors. Using the Global Database feature, any Aurora Database can scan several AWS regions to perform rapid local reads and disaster recovery.
Security
Aurora databases are provided more than one layer of security. They are in a VPC, have encryption at rest through AWS Key Management Service, and even encryption in transit through SSL. Automated backups, snapshots, replicas, and underlying storage are all encrypted.
Compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL
Thanks to its full compatibility with MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, you can easily migrate onsite MySQL or PostgreSQL databases to Aurora, with minimal to no changes needed to code, drivers, tools, and configurations.
Time-Saving
Being fully managed by Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service), time-intensive tasks such as provisioning, updates, and configuration. Monitoring and backups are also handled for you automatically.
Migration Support
Compatibility with MySQL and PostgreSQL database allows for easy migrations to the cloud. The AWS Database Migration Service helps with a secure and easy migration with very little downtime. More information on migrating to the cloud can be found in the documentation.
You can also configure Amazon Aurora for serverless functionality. More on that on our next post.
Marco is a managing partner at copebit. He got seven AWS certifications. He has spent three years in Australia and has worked with AWS and DevOps technologies for the last 6 years.