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Amazon Aurora Getting Key Updates, Including Version 2 of Serverless
Amazon Aurora Serverless, a component of the Amazon Aurora relational database engine that Amazon Web Services (AWS) regularly bills as its fastest-growing product, is getting a major update.
Aurora Serverless Version 2 (v2) is now in preview, AWS announced Tuesday during its 2020 re:Invent virtual conference. The preview, which can be accessed with sign-up here, is currently limited to MySQL-compatible Amazon Aurora deployments.
Aurora Serverless lets users of Amazon Aurora take a hands-off approach to scaling their database capacity. It automatically adjusts capacity as-needed, useful for applications that have irregular, unpredictable or infrequent traffic patterns. Auto-scaling helps organizations avoid purchasing more capacity than they need or, conversely, running out of capacity and experiencing application downtime.
With v1 of Aurora Serverless, capacity is simply doubled whenever it needs to be scaled up, a process that takes five to 50 seconds. With v2, however, it's now able to "scale database workloads to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second," according to AWS.
The amount of capacity added is also more nuanced with v2. Instead of simply doubling capacity as-needed, v2 expands capacity "in fine-grained increments to provide just the right amount of database resources for an application’s needs."
Already in use by tens of thousands of customers, according to AWS, Aurora Serverless will be able support an even wider range of workloads with v2. "For example, Amazon Aurora Serverless can now support enterprises that have hundreds of thousands of applications and want to manage database capacity across the entire fleet," AWS said, "or for Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors that have a multi-tenant environment with hundreds or thousands of databases that each support a different customer."
In other Amazon Aurora news, AWS also announced a new capability for Aurora PostgreSQL that would enable Aurora to run workloads that have been migrated directly from Microsoft SQL Server, with no manual recoding required.
The feature, dubbed Babelfish, "understands T-SQL (Microsoft SQL Server's proprietary SQL dialect), so customers don't have to rewrite all of their application's database requests," AWS explained.
Babelfish is now in preview; sign-up is available here.
AWS also intends to open source in Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL in 2021 under the Apache-2.0 license. The move is aimed at organizations that want to fully move away from SQL Server and its steward, Microsoft, whose licensing practices AWS described in its announcement as "aggressive and manipulative."