Because Growing Demands Deserve Faster Technology – What is Amazon Aurora?

The world is developing riding on the back of technology. The technology has changed the world upside down. Initially, it was hard to understand and make it a part of our lives. But today, technology has become a basic necessity of life. Our lives revolve around technology. It is the biggest discovery in the world till date. Nothing can replace technology and no one even wants to replace technology as it has become dear to everyone. In today’s world, we are surrounded by technology more than anything natural. As we have become addicted or habitual to technology, our demands have increased and hence technology hasn’t stopped growing. With the increase in our demands and comfort, the world of technology has caught a fast pace in its growth for further development of the world. Nowadays, technology is being developed to develop already existing technology. Isn’t it insane to live in the world of technology where there is no end to it? Well, with our never-ending demands, technology is bound to go insane. As we talk about technology, we are ought to discuss coding. Coding is the backbone of technology. There are various platforms on which we operate codes. Let’s discuss what is Amazon Aurora, the newest technology to manage database.

What is Amazon Aurora?

In ludic language, Amazon Aurora is a relational database built for the cloud. It is a hot topic in and around the world today because it is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. The most attractive thing about Aurora is that it has the capability of providing traditional enterprise database’s performance at the cost and simplicity of an open-source database. Aurora is a forever longing platform for technical geeks. It has everything that a technologist always wished while coding on database. Aurora is five times faster than standard MySQL and three times faster than standard PostgreSQL. The cost of Aurora is 1/10 of that of standard databases. At such a low cost, Aurora provides security, reliability and availability of commercial databases. The administration tasks that consume a lot of time are performed in a short span of time by RDS with the help of Aurora. These administration tasks include hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. Aurora is designed to provide all the standard relational database services in a cost-effective manner so that the talent that couldn’t be showcased finally gets a platform to flourish and make a required contribution in the race of development.

The Amazing Features 

Here are some of the mind-blowing features of Aurora that make it sole epitome of database management.

• Auto-Growing storage: With the introduction of Amazon Aurora in your database, the storage size of database volume will grow automatically with the increasing need of the storage growth. It grows in the margin of 10GB up to the maximum of 128TB. It means, with the presence of Aurora, you need not worry about the future growth of our database.
• Serverless Configuration: Aurora Serverless is an on-demand serverless configuration for Aurora. Without managing any database instances, we can run our database in the cloud with the help of Aurora Serverless. Based on our application’s needs, Aurora Serverless will automatically shut down, start-up, and scale up or down.
• Parallel Query: For a faster analytical queries over current data, Aurora has a feature called Parallel Query. The name is such because it does not affect throughput for core transaction workload. While reducing network traffic, it gains a large amount of computing power by pushing the process of query down to the Aurora storage layer.
• 5X MySQL and 3X PostgreSQL: Amazon Aurora is built to provide simplicity and cost-effectiveness alongside standard database. To achieve this goal, it was bound to have such a feature that would fulfill the demand out of the technology. Aurora is 5 times faster than MySQL and 3 times faster than PostgreSQL.
• Global Database: There are many globally distributed applications. For such applications, there is Global Database. For fast local reads and quick disaster recoveries, a single Aurora database is enough to span multiple AWS regions. Aurora provides a backup option for us. We can use secondary region to recover quickly from a regional degradation or outage. In less than a minute, a database can be promoted to full read in secondary region.
• Backups: Amazon Aurora backups are automatic, incremental and continuous. It does not have any impact on database performance. It enables point-in-time recovery for our instances. It means, we can restore our database to any second during retention period, up to last five minutes.
• Database Snapshots: Database snapshots are exceptional database backups that cannot be deleted until the user initiates the deletion process. These are for the instances that are saved in Amazon S3.
• Backtrack: Backtrack allows us to move the database back on track without needing to restore the data from backup. It helps in quick recovery from user errors.
• Encryption: AWS key Management Service allows us to create and manage keys for security of data. Amazon Aurora uses these keys to encrypt our database.
• Amazon Auditing: Aurora, with minimal impact on database performance, allows us to log database events.
• Easy to use: Aurora is developed to provide simplicity of open-source database along with cost-effectiveness. Therefore, it is user-friendly. We can start by launching a new Amazon Aurora Database instance using the Amazon RDS Management Console or a single API call or CLI.
• Database Event Notifications: Amazon Aurora notifies us of the events that require our attention such as automated failover.

Amazon Aurora has a huge list of exciting features that make it a perfect platform for database management. We have discussed a lot of them above that are highly exciting and convincing to use Aurora.

Benefits of Amazon Aurora

Benefits of Amazon Aurora go beyond simplicity and cost-effectiveness. Let’s have a wider look at the Aurora and its benefits:

• High Performance and Scalability: Aurora provides a range of features that make it high performing and scalable. As discussed above, Aurora provides 5X throughput of standard MySQL and 3X throughput of standard PostgreSQL. It is cost-effective as it provides high standard database management at 1/10 of the cost of standard databases. We can manually scale up or down the database deployment or we can use Amazon Aurora serverless to automatically scale the database.
• High Availability and Durability: Aurora replicates six copies of our data across three availability zones. Alongside, it provides 99.99% availability. Aurora continuously backups our data in Amazon S3 making it a secure database platform. It can recover lack of storage automatically making it future friendly. We can always use backtrack feature to recover from user errors as we humans can make mistakes even after such simplicity. But technology is well known to our nature and is always prepared to recover our errors.
• Highly Secure: Amazon Aurora provides multiple level security for our database using network isolation and encryption. In network isolation, Aurora uses Amazon VPC. For encryption, it uses AWS Key Management Service and SSL.
• MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible: Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon RDS. It is fully compatible to open-source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL. With the growth of technology, Amazon Aurora also keeps adding support for new releases regularly. Using standard MySQL and PostgreSQL import/export tools or snapshots, we can easily migrate to Aurora from MySQL and PostgreSQL. It means we can use the tools, code, applications and drivers that we were using in MySQL and PostgreSQL in Aurora with little or no change.
• Fully Managed: We no longer need to worry about database management tasks or administration tasks as Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service. These tasks include hardware provisioning, database setup, patching and backups. Amazon Aurora continuously monitors and backups our database to Amazon S3, enabling granular- point in time recovery.
• Migration Support: Amazon Aurora is completely supporting the migration from MySQL and PostgreSQL to Aurora with a few simple steps. This makes it the all-rounder for database security, availability and reliability.

Amazon Aurora is the newest form of database management and performance. It makes the database management easy and secure by providing simplicity and cost-effectiveness to the needful talent.

Why Choose Amazon Aurora Over Regular RDS?

Aurora’s unique architecture gives more durability, scale and resilience. For many tasks, it is cheaper and faster than running any equivalent RDS database. Let’s discuss these tasks below:

It takes more time compared to Aurora to replica RDS failover. It has to be done manually in RDS whereas it can be done automatically in Aurora. Aurora can detect and recover a failure in less than a minute whereas RDS takes longer than a minute. Aurora eliminates the need to warm up the database caches that are helpful in better response times. Without losing any data, Aurora can automatically failover to a replica the time of permanent failure.

At the time of point-in-time recovery, Amazon Aurora does not need to replay the redo logs from the last checkpoint which makes it faster than RDS. The replication on Amazon Aurora uses the same logging and storage layers which in turn improves the replication process.

Amazon Aurora supports automatic backup of data whereas RDS needs manual setup of backup window to automatically backup the data. During backup window, storage I/o may be suspended while our data is being backed up and we may experience delay.

Aurora supports two kinds of replicas which share the same underlying volume as the primary instance. On Aurora, failover is automatic with no loss of data, whereas RDS includes chances of data loss. Aurora transparently handles the loss of up to two copies of data without affecting the database write availability.

Aurora is fault tolerant and self-healing as it makes six copies of our data across three availability zones. Aurora’s performance is higher and more consistent than RDS. This makes Aurora more reliable and available.

There are more read replicas and reader endpoints on Aurora than RDS. This is what makes it more automated and self-relying than RDS.

The Bottom Line 

Amazon Aurora is another wonder made by technology. It is a blessing to the world of database and database administrators. Technology always eases out our daily challenges, Aurora is for database administrators. Putting an eye on the increase in the challenges of database administrator, the world of technology had to poke in their hand to rescue administrators from the never-ending challenges. It has made life so much easier and better with high-speed and simplicity. The best part is not yet discussed. The cost-effectiveness of Aurora has made it a platform worth using for database creation and management. The world is full of talents and mysteries. We need to find them and then utilize them to make our lives better and easier. Technology is the biggest discovery that has opened a way for further discovery for hidden talents and ideas. Our ideas make technology possible, and technology makes our ideas possible.

Aurora’s unique storage design provides many advantages when compared to commercial RDS databases. It is highly advisable to use Aurora over RDS for enterprise-level applications. Both regular RDS and Aurora use the same security and backup features of Amazon RDS. Therefore, we can secure our database using the same tools like security groups, IAM authentication, encryption at rest and in transit etc. They both provide point-in-time recovery. So, the backup feature is also the same.

Looking at the previous decades, we have come a long way of development. This gives us hope and expectation for an even more digital world. Today, we stand at a place that the previous generations wouldn’t have imagined. Now, we look for a better future which will happen slowly but certainly. We think technology is the only way out of the everyday tasks and challenges that make our lives harder. Technology is and will continue to grow with the growing demands of human race. Tell us what you think of our thoughts on technology?