When I’m learning new about new technologies, one of the first things, I’ll do is write a numbered list 1-10 and then fill that numbered list in with points about that particular technology. I realised that these lists might be useful to others so I’m going to start posting them. This week I looked at AWS Aurora.
Amazon Aurora is a cloud-based database solution (database-as-a-service DBaas) that is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL.
Using Amazon Aurora has the benefit that users don't have to deal with the headaches involved in managing and maintaining physical hardware for their databases.
Another benefit of using Aurora over MySQL and PostgreSQL is the performance. Aurora is around 5 times as fast as MySQL, and around 3 times as fast as PostgreSQL when compared on the same hardware.
With Aurora, the concern about database capacity is eradicated because the storage on Aurora will automatically scale all the way from the 10gb minimum to the 64TB maximum. Meaning, the maximum table size (64TB) using Aurora is four times the size of the maximum table size (16TB) of innodb.
A further benefit of Aurora over MySQL is replication. In Aurora, you can create up to 15 replicas
One of the most prominent drawbacks of AWS Aurora is that it is only compatible with MySQL 5.6 and 5.7.
A somewhat minor drawback is that the port number of connections to the database cannot be configured, they are locked at 3306
Another benefit is that, as you would expect, Aurora has great integration capabilities with other AWS products, for example, you can invoke an AWS Lambda function from within an AWS Aurora database cluster. You can also load data from S3 buckets.
With AWS Aurora, the minimum RDS instance size you can use is r3.large, which will impact the cost of using AWS Aurora.
AWS Aurora is also not available on the AWS free tier
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