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Amazon's Aurora Database Hits Prime Time
Amazon Aurora, Amazon Web Services' bid to streamline the traditional relational database model, has left the preview stage.
First unveiled at last year's AWS re:Invent conference, the Aurora database engine is now ready for use in production environments, the company announced on Monday. Currently, it is available out of three AWS regions -- U.S. East (Northern Virginia), U.S. West (Oregon) and Europe (Ireland) -- but AWS says it plans to expand its availability to more regions "in the coming months."
Detailed pricing information for Aurora is available here. In summary, database instances come in five sizes, and users pay on a per-hour basis for any database instances they require, as well as up to 15 replicas. In the U.S. regions where Aurora is available, that means paying as little as $0.29 per hour for the "db.r3.large" instance and as much as $4.64 per hour for the "db.r3.8xlarge" instance.
Users also pay for the storage used by their Aurora database (in the U.S. regions, amounting to $0.10 per GB per month) and for every 1 million I/O requests (amounting to $0.20 per million).
AWS touts Aurora as "a MySQL-compatible, relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases." The product promises to deliver 5x speed improvements over MySQL and at a tenth of the cost of traditional databases.
AWS evangelist Jeff Barr outlined a few of Aurora's features in a blog post Monday. They include:
- Zero-downtime migrations from Amazon RDS for MySQL
- The ability to view reports and take action on data using Amazon CloudWatch
- The ability to create replicas within 10 to 20 minutes
More information about Aurora is available at this product page.