Amazon Aurora Explained

Amazon Aurora is a proprietary relational database offered as a service by Amazon Web Services (AWS) since October 2014.^{[1] [2]} Aurora is available as part of the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).

History

Aurora offered MySQL compatible service upon its release in 2014. It added PostgreSQL compatibility in October 2017.^[3]

In August 2017, Aurora Fast Cloning (copy-on-write) feature was added allowing customers to create copies of their databases.^[4] In May 2018, Aurora Backtrack was added which allows developers to rewind database clusters without creating a new one.^[5] It became possible to stop and start Aurora Clusters in September 2018.^[6] In August 2018, Amazon began to offer a serverless version.^{[7] [8]}

In 2019 the developers of Aurora won the SIGMOD Systems Award for fundamentally redesigning relational database storage for cloud environments.^[9]

Features

Aurora automatically allocates database storage space in 10-gigabyte increments, as needed, up to a maximum of 128 terabytes.^[10] Aurora offers automatic, six-way replication of those chunks across three availability zones for improved availability and fault-tolerance.^[11]

Aurora provides users with performance metrics, such as query throughput and latency.^[12] It provides fast database cloning.^[13]

Aurora Multi-Master allows creation of multiple read-write instances in an Aurora database across multiple availability zones, which enables uptime-sensitive applications to achieve continuous write availability through instance failure.^[14]

Amazon designed Aurora to be compatible with MySQL, meaning that tools for querying or managing MySQL databases (such as the command-line client and the MySQL Workbench graphical user-interface) can be used. As of December 2021, Amazon Aurora is compatible with MySQL 5.6, 5.7, and 8.0.^[15] It supports InnoDB as a storage engine.^[16]

See also

• Amazon Relational Database Service
• Amazon DocumentDB

External links

• Amazon Aurora: Design Considerations for High Throughput Cloud-Native Relational Databases - SIGMOD'17 (ACM digital library)
• Amazon Web Services, Inc. . Amazon Web Services . 2014-11-12 . Amazon Web Services Announces Amazon Aurora . phx.corporate-ir.net . Press release . Seattle, WA . 2014-11-13.

Notes and References

1. Web site: Amazon Aurora – New Cost-Effective MySQL-Compatible Database Engine for Amazon RDS. November 12, 2014. Amazon Web Services.
2. Web site: Amazon Claims New Aurora DB Engine Screams With Speed . Chris . Preimesberger . eweek.com . 2014-11-12 . 2014-11-13.
3. Web site: Now Available – Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility. 2017-10-24. Amazon Web Services. en-US. 2019-04-07.
4. Web site: Amazon Aurora Fast Database Cloning . August 30, 2017. 2020-09-15. en-US.
5. Web site: AWS launches an undo feature for its Aurora database service. 2020-09-11. TechCrunch. May 10, 2018 . en-US.
6. Web site: Amazon Aurora Now Supports Stopping and Starting of Database Clusters. Amazon Web Services, Inc.. en-US. 2019-04-07.
7. Web site: Aurora Serverless MySQL Generally Available. 2018-08-09. Amazon Web Services. en-US. 2019-04-07.
8. Web site: When should I use Amazon RDS vs. Aurora Serverless?. 2020-09-11. SearchCloudComputing. en.
9. Web site: Awards - SIGMOD/PODS 2019 . SIGMOD 2019 . 9 August 2019.
10. Web site: Amazon Aurora Increases Maximum Storage Size to 128TB. 28 September 2020.
11. Web site: Amazon Aurora FAQs MySQL PostgreSQL Relational Database Amazon Web Services. 2021-03-09. Amazon Web Services, Inc.. en-US.
12. Web site: Monitoring Amazon Aurora performance metrics. November 19, 2015. Datadog. 15 September 2016.
13. Web site: Amazon Aurora Fast Database Cloning. 2017-08-30. Amazon Web Services. en-US. 2019-04-12.
14. Web site: Amazon Aurora Multi-Master is Now Generally Available.
15. Web site: Amazon Aurora supports MySQL 8.0. 24 December 2021.
16. Web site: Amazon Aurora Product Details . 15 September 2016.