Amazon's New Aurora Cloud Database Service is MySQL 5.6-Compatible, Self-Replicating and Self-Scaling

Amazon Relational Database Service, launched in 2009, promised cloud-hosted MySQL in demand, eventually adding SQL Server, Oracle and PostgreSQL as well.

On Wednesday, Amazon announced a new incarnation of MySQL that the company says it has been rebuilt from the inside out specifically for the cloud and designed to require less maintenance and offers protection to existing databases Amazon.

Amazon RDS for Aurora aims to be fully compatible with existing MySQL 5.6 applications and tools, while also providing five times the performance of the vanilla version of MySQL running on the same hardware. But instead of replacing the existing MySQL RDS option, offering a fault tolerant version of self-maintenance.

In a blog post announcing the product, Amazon makes little direct mention of whether Aurora is a from scratch re-implementation of MySQL or new reworked version of the same source. Instead, Aurora proclaims solution based on self-scaled data and auto-tuning that "[s] to eliminate bottlenecks caused by waiting for I / S and lock contention between processes database "and was designed to take advantage of the architecture of cloud instead of running in" an environment of limited hardware and somewhat simplistic. "

Amazon implies that the benefits of the aurora from a combination of their infrastructure, design and blot again, and integration with existing features like Amazon availability zones. The company describes the hardware used for Aurora built as a "virtualized storage layer based on SSD integrated purpose workloads databases." Storage is automatically added to an instance of Aurora, as needed, 10GB at a time, to 64TB, and replicated across three AWS availability zones, with two copies of the data in each area.

Amazon RDS has included a high availability feature since 2010, but with Aurora, cross-area replication is standard, rather than a special order.

As with other Amazon services, you pay only for what you use with Aurora. Prices for an instance, including replication, start at 29 cents per hour to 15.25GB of memory and two virtual CPUs. However, storage and I / S are billed separately: 10 cents per gigabyte per month and 20 cents per million requests respectively. Reserved Instances provide some savings, with a starting price for the use of a year to $ 625 (below $ 2,500 more).

For now, it seems more interested in competing on features that pricing in Aurora Amazon. Google Offers packages start at 36 cents per day and include replication, but the lowest pack range covers only half a gigabyte of storage, 200,000 E / S operations per day, and a quarter one gigabyte of memory. While the old school of Amazon RDS for MySQL instances starts at 1.7 cents per hour, E / S and are extra storage, storage tops out at 3TB, and replication across areas availability is another supplement.

Auto provisioning, auto-maintenance, and self-healing aspects of Aurora clearly understood to bring developers, since manual handling can be a distraction. Aurora features are reminiscent of those of the recently released Snow Snowflake Elastic Data Warehouse, a system database in the cloud for processing both structured and semi-structured data; Snowflake also automatically scales storage to meet demand. But snowflake is aimed primarily at supporting workloads BI, and Aurora is having more attractive due to the integration with Amazon, and allowing hordes of MySQL developers to move their workloads minimal effort.