Amazon Aurora, a New Distributed Relational Database from AWS

Nov 12th, 2014 11:34am by Alex Williams

Editor’s Note: We are are at AWS re:Invent this week where I will be posting about AWS news and reports from the show floor. I am particularly interested in the developer tool ecosystem players so I expect to spend most of my time talking to users and the companies here that are part of the AWS ecosystem. Expect a series of short posts from the conference — a bit different than what we usually do. But the goal is to give a flavor for who’s here and the pulse of what’s happening in this new stack world.

AWS launched a MySQL compatible databases called Amazon Aurora at AWS re:Invent this morning. The database is designed to be fault tolerant, scalable and an alternative to to high-end SAN environments.

It is compatible with MySQL and can scale to run six million inserts per minute. It is available through the AWS RDS service.

The relational database will add storage in 10 gigabyte increments on an as-needed basis. It can scale up to 64 terabytes. Storage scales in a linear fashion as more data is stored.

According to the AWS blog, storage is replicated across three AWS availability zones with two copies of the data in each availability zone. Aurora also has concurrency and self-healing built in and is distributed across SSD-powered storage.

“Amazon Aurora can tolerate the loss of two copies of the data while it is handling writes and three copies of the data while it is handling reads.”

According to AWS, with this method, data is backed to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), which is done in parallel without imposing any load on the database instance. Instant backups are automatic.

Aurora is what we see often described as a converged system. It combines the “storage, network, compute, system software, and database software.”

The news from AWS today is another example of the shift to new stack architectures that can take advantage of distributed infrastructures that their predecessors just can’t match.

Alex Williams is founder and publisher of The New Stack. He's a longtime technology journalist who did stints at TechCrunch, SiliconAngle and what is now known as ReadWrite. Alex has been a journalist since the late 1980s, starting at the...