News
Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Support Hits Availability
Six months after releasing it as a public beta, Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week announced the general availability of the PostgreSQL-compatible Amazon Aurora service.
The fast-growing Amazon Aurora first debuted in 2014 as AWS' answer to the traditional relational database model, which it described as expensive, proprietary and difficult to license. The product initially launched in 2015 with support for MySQL, though AWS has been working on adding PostgreSQL support since last November.
As of Tuesday, that support is now production-ready. Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility is currently available out of AWS' Northern Virginia, Ohio, Oregon and Ireland regions, though the company says it will expand that availability to other regions soon. Pricing information is available here.
With the release, AWS is promising up to 3X performance improvements over traditional PostgreSQL databases, at a tenth of their price. It supports PostgreSQL version 9.6.3 and is capable of scaling up to 64TB for storage.
Other features include six-way replication and built-in database monitoring via AWS' Performance Insights tool, which is now available in public preview.
The addition of PostgreSQL to Amazon Aurora comes at a time when developers are increasingly turning to PostgreSQL due to its support for JSON, NoSQL and complex SQL, AWS argued.
"While we've been amazed at the growth of Amazon Aurora's MySQL-compatible edition, many of our enterprise customers anxious to move on from their old world database providers have been waiting for Amazon Aurora's PostgreSQL-compatible edition to launch into general availability," said Raju Gulabani, head of databases, analytics and machine learning at AWS, in a prepared statement. "We're excited to help these customers take another step toward database freedom."
AWS is offering a free, six-month migration period for organizations looking to switch from their database environment to Amazon Aurora. The offer entails using AWS' Database Migration Service (DMS) and its Schema Conversion Tool (SCT), explained AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post.
"The Schema Conversion Tool will perform a quick assessment of your database schemas and your code in order to help you to choose between MySQL and PostgreSQL. Our new, limited-time, Free DMS program allows you to use DMS and SCT to migrate to Aurora at no cost, with access to several types of DMS Instances for up to 6 months," Barr wrote.