Last night at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services announced Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible database engine for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). The firm claims that the engine combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases, with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.
Amazon Aurora provides up to five times better performance than the typical MySQL database, availability as good or better than commercial databases or high-end SANs and superior scalability and security – all at one-tenth the cost of high-end commercial database offerings.
With no upfront costs or commitments required, AWS says customers pay a simple hourly charge for each Amazon Aurora database instance they use, with Amazon Aurora automatically scaling storage capacity with no downtime or performance degradation.
"Amazon RDS has lowered the cost of managing relational databases for thousands of AWS customers, and as demand has exploded over the last few years, we’ve added MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL engines," said Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Database Services, Amazon Web Services.
"But, what we’ve consistently heard from our customers was that they wished they had an easier way to get the performance of commercial databases at the price of open source engines. This is why we built Amazon Aurora. We’ve spent the last three years working on a MySQL-compatible database that innovates on the engine and storage layers to deliver five times the performance of MySQL at one-tenth the price of commercial database solutions."
