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What is Amazon Aurora : Benefits & Use Cases

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Amazon Aurora

Amazon offers cloud services to its customers via Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is the market leader in the Cloud segment. They offer a multitude of services as solutions to their customers that helps them reduce costs, bring down expenses, and boost profits. All of these services are billed per usage. Like many of these services are billed on an hourly basis and the capacity that’s being used. Amazon Aurora is one such service that AWS offers as a database service.

Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora is a relational database service from AWS that is MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible. This database is built for the cloud, combining the availability and performance of enterprise-grade databases combined with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of databases that are open-source.

There are several reasons why you must choose Aurora if you have high-performance requirements. As it’s five times faster than MySQL and three times faster than PostgreSQL database. Aurora finds the middle ground between commercial and open source databases. As it offers high availability, security, and high reliability with low costs (1/10th the costs of commercial ones). Take up the AWS DevOps Certification training from Intellipaat to help you master this domain from scratch.

Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service) fully manages Aurora. In this way, you can avoid time taking administration tasks like provisioning hardware, setting up a database, backing and patching up, etc.

The Aurora features a storage system that is self-healing, fault-tolerant, and distributed. This storage system can auto-scale to 128TB per database instance. Some advantages of Aurora are that it replicates data in three different availability zones, continuously backs up data to S3, point-in-time recovery, and many more.

So let’s now focus our attention on various features of Amazon Aurora that make it the best package that companies can’t avoid if they are eyeing an enterprise-grade database.

Various features of Amazon Aurora

High availability and durability

The Amazon Aurora is built to offer a very high availability of 99.99%. As we discussed earlier it replicates data into six copies and makes it available across three different availability zones. It also backs the data continuously to Amazon S3. It also helps you recover cleanly from physical storage failure and instance failover.

Tight Security

AWS Aurora offers multiple levels of security to the database. This also includes using Amazon VPC, data encryption both at rest as well as in transit using AWS KMS (Key Management Service) and SSL.

High scalability and performance

As we have already discussed, with Aurora you will get five times the performance of MySQL and three times the performance of PostgreSQL. You can scale up or down your database, or you can choose Aurora Serverless to handle scaling automatically. It increases the storage limit automatically with need and has an upper limit of 128TB. All of this comes at 1/10th the cost of a commercial database.

Good compatibility with MySQL and PostgreSQL

This relational database is completely compatible with your existing MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. Along with that they also release frequent supports for newly released versions. This helps smooth the migration from standard MySQL or PostgreSQL to Aurora. This level of compatibility means Aurora supports the same code, drivers, tools, applications, etc., which you were using for standard MySQL or PostgreSQL databases.

Complete level management

Once you switch to AWS Aurora, everything is handled by AWS RDS. It will take care of hardware provisioning, data backing configuration, setups, software patching, etc. Watch and monitor database performance using Amazon CloudWatch.

Migration Support

If a company is using the standard MySQL or PostgreSQL database, and if you are looking to migrate to Amazon Aurora. Then there is a suite of tools that will help with the migration process. This way the whole migration process becomes very easy.

Amazon Aurora Use Cases

AWS Aurora is used in various use cases. I have listed here three popular use-cases of Amazon Aurora.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Generally, SaaS applications rely on the multi-architecture tenant. This type of architecture requires high instance flexibility and storage scaling. AWS Aurora offers managed database service to SaaS applications which will help these companies to build high-quality applications without worrying about the underlying processes.

Gaming

Gaming industries are increasingly leveraging cloud computing to leap forward into this digital era. They require databases that require huge storage capacity, high availability, high scalability, and high throughput. Amazon Aurora doesn’t have a licensing constraint, so it perfectly fits the usage pattern of gaming software.

Enterprise application

It is a perfect fit for enterprise applications that rely on relational databases. Compared to commercial databases, Aurora helps you cut down costs by almost 90% or more. It also helps in improving a database’s reliability and availability. This service helps in saving time by automating tasks like provisioning, recovery, backing up, patching, repair, and failure detection.