Exploring AWS !!

Day 40:

Amazon Aurora

Overview:

• Amazon Aurora is a proprietary technology from AWS (not open sourced)
• PostgreSQL and MySQL are bot supported as Aurora Database (means your drivers will work as if Aurora was Postgres or MySQL database)
• Aurora is AWS cloud optimized and claims 5X performance improvement as compared to MySQL on RDS, over 3X performance of PostgreSQL on RDS.
• Aurora storage automatically grows with increments of 10GB to 128TB.
• It can’ve 15 replicas while MySQL has 5 and replication is faster.
• Failover in Aurora is instantaneous, its High availability native.
• Aurora costs more than RDS (20% more) but is more efficient.

Aurora High Availability and Read Scaling:

• 6 copies of your data across 3 AZs:
• 4 copies out of 6 needed for writes.
• 3 copies out of 6 needed 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 + upto 15 Aurora Read Replicas serve reads.
• Support for cross region replication.

Aurora Database Cluster: —

Features of Aurora:

• Automatic failover
• Back up and recovery
• Isolation and Security
• Industry compliance
• Push-button Scaling
• Automated Patching with zero downtime
• Advanced downtime
• Routine Maintenance
• Backtrack: restore data at any point of time without using backups

Aurora Security:

• Similar to RDS because uses same engine
• Encryption at Rest using KMS
• Automated backups, snapshots and replicas are also encrypted
• Encryption in flight using SSL (same as MySQL and Postgres)
• Possibility to authenticate IAM token
• You are responsible for protecting instance with security groups.
• You can’t SSH.