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.

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