Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com company, has unveiled Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible database engine that combines high-end commercial databases with open source databases.
The platform has been made generally available after nine months of testing. The company claims Amazon Aurora can provide up to five times better performance than the typical MySQL database.
Amazon first announced Aurora last November and adapted the interface of MySQL but used its own back-end cloud technologies to give the system a powerful performance boost.
It notes Amazon Aurora has the scalability, durability, and reliability to run the most demanding enterprise and Internet-scale applications - everything from massive Internet of things applications to mission-critical e-commerce sites.
Historically, Amazon says organisations have had to trade off critical capabilities like high performance and mission-critical availability with an affordable price when choosing database solutions.
Amazon Aurora automatically replicates data across multiple Availability Zones and continuously backs up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service, which is designed for 99.99% durability without performance impact, it adds.
The company notes Aurora is designed to offer greater than 99.99% availability and automatically detect and recover from most database failures in less than 60 seconds, without crash recovery or the need to rebuild database caches.
Amazon Aurora continually monitors instance health and if there is a failure, it will automatically failover to a read replica without loss of data.
"Today's commercial-grade databases are expensive, proprietary, high lock-in, and come with punitive licensing terms that these database providers are comfortable employing," says Raju Gulabani, vice-president for database services at Amazon Web Services.
"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."
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