Aurora

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Aurora Icon

About

• A proprietary database technology from AWS.

• Postgres and MySQL are both supported with Aurora.

• Drivers MySQL and Postgres are compatible with them.

• AWS claims Aurora is cloud optimized with 5x performance improvement over MySQL on RDS and 3x performance improvement over Postgres on RDS.

• Storage grows by factor of 10 GB, with maximum limit of 128 TB.

• Can have upto 15 Read Replicas and read replication is faster than MySQL (sub 10 ms replication lag).

• Failover in Aurora is instantaneous. Its HA native.

• More efficient than RDS, but 20% more costly.

• Audit Logs can be enabled so that they get sent to CloudWatch.

• No option to SSH into the server available.

• Database capacity for serverless v2 class of DB is measured in ACU (Aurora Capacity Units) and can range from 0.5 upto 128 ACU, with 1 ACU providing 2 GiB of memory and corresponding compute and networking.

• Audit Logs can be enabled and sent to CloudWatch Logs for longer retention.

Availability

• It maintains 6 copies of the data, across 3 AZ.

  • Needs only 3 copies out 6 for reads.

  • Needs 4 copies out 6 for writes.

  • Self healing with peer to peer replication.

  • Storage is stripped across 100s of volumes.
• Aurora has only one master for writes. Automated failover for master is less than 30 seconds. Its HA native.

• Supports cross region replication.

• Can add Region if global database is supported for the specific Aurora DB version.

Scalability

• Can have upto 15 read replicas, where any of these read replica can become a master in case of failover.

• The storage is auto expanding.

• It also provides replica auto scaling policy feature based on

  • Average CPU Utilization

  • Average connections of Aurora Replica

  • Also allows to specify Minimum and Maximum number of read replicas

  • Scale in and scale out cooldown period can also be specified.

Aurora Cluster

• Writer endpoint of cluster always points to the master, even in the case of failover.

• Auto scaling can be set up for read replicas.

• Reader endpoint is a load balancer endpoint, where it connects to Read Replicas (multiple read instances).

• Load balancing for Read Replicas is done at connection level.

Features of Aurora

• Automatic failover

• Backup and recovery

• Isolation and security

• Compliance

• Push-button scaling

• Automated patching with zero downtime.

• Advanced Monitoring

• Routing Maintenance

• Backtrack : Restore data at any point of time without using backups.