At the AWS re:Invent event, AWS announced a brand new database called Amazon Aurora. It will be available under the Amazon RDS offering that already supports MySQL, MS SQL Server, Oracle and PostgreSQL.
According to AWS, Amazon Aurora is a relational database engine that combines the speed and reliability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. It is designed to deliver up to five times the throughput of standard MySQL running on the same hardware. As a managed database offering, Amazon RDS handles administrative tasks like provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, failure detection, and repair. Amazon Aurora is available through the pay-as-you-go pricing model.
Amazon Aurora is replicated across three availability zones (AZs) for higher durability and availability. Storage is allocated in 10 GB blocks distributed across an array of SSD-powered storage. This delivers higher degree of concurrent access with self-healing capability. Amazon Aurora does a rapid backup to Amazon’s object storage service, S3.
According to the official blog post, Amazon Aurora is designed for 99.99% availability. It will automatically recover from instance and storage failures. Customers can create up to 15 Amazon Aurora replicas to increase read throughput and for use as failover targets. The replicas share storage with the primary instance and as such provide lightweight, fine-grained replication that is almost synchronous.
Customers can scale the compute resources allocated to the DB Instance, up to 32 vCPUs and 244 GiB Memory.
Currently in preview, Amazon Aurora is available only in US East (N. Virginia) AWS region.