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AWS Tweaks Aurora as Its Database Migrations Climb
Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week announced several improvements to its relational database product, Amazon Aurora.
Users can now replicate encrypted databases across regions, the company said Tuesday, enabling them to "scale read operations to a location close to your users, build a disaster recovery architecture that spans the globe, and easily migrate data from one region to another, all the while maintaining full encryption at rest and in transit."
In addition, AWS added support for encrypted database snapshots across regions. "This means distributed development and testing teams can implement global DevOps processes by securely sharing up-to-date copies of production databases. It also allows you to enhance your disaster recovery strategy by securely storing snapshots in remote regions," AWS said.
Besides copying them across regions, Aurora users can also now share encrypted snapshots between accounts. "The owner of the other account can copy the snapshot or restore a database instance from it," AWS said in a separate announcement Tuesday. According to the company, this capability lets separate accounts that have the same encryption keys to take advantage of AWS' security model.
Considered to be AWS' fastest-growing service to date, Aurora is a PostgreSQL- and MySQL-compatible managed database service that promises as much as a fivefold performance improvement over competitors, at a tenth of the cost.
News of the improvements came as AWS is touting the success of its overall database services portfolio. AWS evangelist Jeff Barr said this week that the company's Database Migration Service (DMS), which has been generally available about a year now, has clocked 20,000 database migrations to date -- up from 16,000 at the end of last year.
"And that the pace continues to accelerate," Barr wrote in a blog post.
DMS is designed to help organizations migrate their databases, both on-premises and in the cloud, to AWS' own database services, including Aurora.