Amazon Aurora is AWS's proprietary high-performance relational database engine, fully compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. This post covers Aurora's architecture, its performance advantages (up to 5x over standard MySQL), storage auto-scaling, Aurora Serverless, Global Database for multi-region deployments, and how it compares to standard RDS.
Amazon Aurora
- Aurora is a proprietary technology from AWS (not open-sourced)
- Postgres and MySQL are both supported as Aurora DB (that means your drivers will work as if Aurora was a Postgres or MySQL database)
- Aurora is “AWS cloud optimized” and claims 5x performance improvement over MySQL on RDS, over 3x the performance of Postgres on RDS
- Aurora storage automatically grows in increments of 10GB, up to 128 TB.
- Aurora can have up to 15 replicas and the replication process is faster than MySQL (sub 10ms replica lag)
- Failover in Aurora is instantaneous. It’s HA native.
- Aurora costs more than RDS (20% more) - but is more efficient
Features of Aurora
- Automatic fail-over
- Backup and recovery
- Isolation and security
- Industry compliance
- Push-button scaling
- Automated patching with zero downtime
- Advanced monitoring
- Routing maintenance
- Backtrack : restore data at any point in time without using backups
Aurora Hands-on
RDS > databases > create database > standard create > choose Amazon Aurora> choose version as you like > Templates - production > Settings > username admin and password linn1197 > instance configuration > Burstable classes > db t3 small > click create database
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Amazon Aurora?
Amazon Aurora is a fully managed, MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database engine built for the cloud, offering up to 5x the throughput of standard MySQL and 3x that of PostgreSQL with built-in high availability and automated failover.
What is the difference between Aurora and RDS?
Aurora is a cloud-native database engine optimized for AWS with higher performance and availability than standard RDS; RDS offers more database engine choices (Oracle, SQL Server, etc.) while Aurora is limited to MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility but provides superior performance.