Historically, customers have had to choose between performance and price when evaluating database solutions. Commercial databases offer high performance and advanced availability features, but are expensive, complex to manage, have high lock-in, and come with punitive licensing terms. Open source databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL require less capital expense, but customers often find they cannot achieve the performance or availability of commercial databases. Amazon Aurora offers the best of both worlds—the performance and availability of the highest-grade commercial databases at a cost more commonly associated with open source. And, with more and more enterprises embracing PostgreSQL for its user-defined functions and data types, complex SQL support, NoSQL and JSON support, broad application language support, and closer semantics to some of the old guard databases, Amazon Aurora’s PostgreSQL launch comes at a great time for customers looking to break free of the cost and complexity of traditional commercial databases.
Amazon Aurora delivers up to several times better performance compared to standard MySQL and PostgreSQL by using a variety of software and hardware techniques to ensure the database is able to fully leverage available compute, memory, and networking resources. Amazon Aurora storage scales automatically, growing and rebalancing Input and Outputs (I/O) across the fleet to provide consistent performance. For example, a customer can start with a database of 10GB and have it automatically grow up to 64TB, without requiring any downtime. Amazon Aurora is highly available and durable, automatically replicating data across multiple Availability Zones and continuously backing up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which is designed for 99.999999999 percent durability. Amazon Aurora is designed to offer greater than 99.99 percent availability and to automatically detect and recover from most database failures in less than 30 seconds, without crashing or the need to rebuild database caches. Amazon Aurora continually monitors instance health and, if there is a failure, it will automatically failover to a read replica without loss of data.
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