Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora is a proprietary relational database offered as a service by Amazon Web Services (AWS) since October 2014.^[1][2] Aurora is available as part of the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS).

Amazon Aurora

Developer(s)	Amazon.com
Initial release	October 2014; 10 years ago (2014-10) [1]
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	English
Type	relational database SaaS
License	Proprietary
Website	aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/

History

Aurora offered MySQL compatible service upon its release in 2014. It added PostgreSQL compatibility in October 2017.^[3]

In August 2017, Aurora Fast Cloning (copy-on-write) feature was added allowing customers to create copies of their databases.^[4] In May 2018, Aurora Backtrack was added which allows developers to rewind database clusters without creating a new one.^[5] It became possible to stop and start Aurora Clusters in September 2018.^[6] In August 2018, Amazon began to offer a serverless version.^[7][8]

In 2019 the developers of Aurora won the SIGMOD Systems Award for fundamentally redesigning relational database storage for cloud environments.^[9]

Features

Aurora automatically allocates database storage space in 10-gigabyte increments, as needed, up to a maximum of 128 terabytes.^[10] Aurora offers automatic, six-way replication of those chunks across three availability zones for improved availability and fault-tolerance.^[11]

Aurora provides users with performance metrics, such as query throughput and latency.^[12] It provides fast database cloning.^[13]

Aurora Multi-Master allows creation of multiple read-write instances in an Aurora database across multiple availability zones, which enables uptime-sensitive applications to achieve continuous write availability through instance failure.^[14]

Amazon designed Aurora to be compatible with MySQL, meaning that tools for querying or managing MySQL databases (such as the mysql command-line client and the MySQL Workbench graphical user-interface) can be used. As of December 2021, Amazon Aurora is compatible with MySQL 5.6, 5.7, and 8.0.^[15] It supports InnoDB as a storage engine.^[16]

See also

• Amazon Relational Database Service
• Amazon DocumentDB