Looking for an alternative to your old, clunky MySQL database? Amazon has released Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible database engine that may just be the perfect fit.
Amazon is positioning the relational database as an alternative to the costly, high-end commercial databases available today as well as those of the open-source variety. In addition to some notable performance improvements (Amazon is touting five-times performance over the typical MySQL database), what is perhaps most interesting about Amazon Aurora is that it automatically replicates data across multiple Availability Zones and continuously backs up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). Aurora also monitors instance health and if something happens to fail, it will automatically failover to read replicate without loss of data.
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"Today's commercial-grade databases are expensive, proprietary, high lock-in, and come with punitive licensing terms that these database providers are comfortable employing," said 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."
Amazon Aurora is available as a database engine for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) in the U.S. East (N. Virginia), U.S. West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) Regions, and will expand to additional Regions in the coming months.