Amazon Aurora
- Aurora is a proprietary technology from AWS (not open sourced)
- Postgres and MySQL are both supported as Aurora DB (thaat means your drivers will work as if Aurora was a Postgres or MySQL database)
- Aurora is "AWS cloud optimized" and claims 5x performance improvement over MySQL on RDS, over 3x the performance of Postgres on RDS
- Aurora storage automatically grows in increments of 10GB up to 64TB.
- Aurora can have 15 replicas while MySQL has 5, and the replication process is faster (sub 10ms replica lag)
- Failover in Aurora is instantaneous. It's HA native.
- Aurora costs more than RDS (20% more) - bit is more efficient.
Aurora High Availability and Read Scaling
- 6 copies of your data across 3 AZ:
- 4 copies out of 6 needed for writes
- 3 copies out of 6 need for reads
- Self healing with peer-to-peer replication
- Storage is striped across 100s of volumes
- One aurora instance takes writes (master)
- Automated failover for master in less than 30 seconds
- Master + up to 15 aurora read replicas serve reads
- Support for cross region replication
Features of Aurora
- Automatic failover
- Backup and Recovery
- Isolation and security
- Industry compliance
- Push-button scaling
- Automated Patching with Zero Downtime
- Advanced Monitoring
- Routine Maintenance
- Backtrack: restore data at any point in time without using backups
Aurora Security
- Similar to RDS because uses the same engines
- Encryption at rest using KMS
- Automated backups, snapshots and replicas are also encrypted
- Encryption in flight using SSL (same process as MySQL or Postgres)
- Possibility to authenticate using IAM token (same method as RDS)
- You are responsible for protecting the instance with security groups
- You can't ssh into it