Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced the availability of Amazon Aurora in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) region. Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible database engine for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.
IMAGE CREDIT: MELBA BERNAD
Amazon Aurora provides up to five times better performance than the typical MySQL and is three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases, with availability as good or better than commercial databases or high-end SANs, superior scalability and security. With no upfront costs or commitments required, customers pay a simple hourly charge for each Amazon Aurora database instance they use and Amazon Aurora can automatically scale storage capacity with no downtime or performance degradation.
“Historically, customers have had to choose between performance and price when evaluating database solutions. Our customers have consistently told us that they wished for an easier way to get the performance of commercial databases, at the price of open source engines,” said Nick Walton, Managing Director, ASEAN, AWS. “Amazon Aurora is a database engine that gives customers the best of both worlds – the performance and availability of the highest-grade commercial databases at a cost more commonly associated with open source.”
Highly durable and available, Amazon Aurora automatically replicates data across multiple Availability Zones and continuously backs up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which is designed for 99.999999999 percent durability without performance impact. Amazon Aurora is designed to offer greater than 99.99 percent availability, and to automatically detect and recover from most database failures in less than 60 seconds, without crash recovery or the need to rebuild database caches. Amazon Aurora continually monitors instance health and if there is a failure, it will automatically failover to a read replica without loss of data.
Amazon Aurora delivers these dramatic increases over MySQL and PostgreSQL performance and availability by tightly integrating the database engine with an SSD-backed virtualized storage layer purpose-built for database workloads, reducing writes to the storage system, minimizing lock contention, and eliminating delays created by database process threads. Amazon Aurora storage is fault-tolerant, transparently tolerating the loss of disks and Availability Zones, and self-healing,
automatically monitoring and repairing bad blocks and disks. In addition, Amazon Aurora storage scales automatically, growing and rebalancing Input/Outputs (I/O) across the fleet to provide consistent performance without over-provisioning. For example, a customer can start with a database of 10GB and have it automatically grow up to 64TB, without requiring any availability disruptions to resize or restripe data.
Customers in Southeast Asia welcomed the availability of Amazon Aurora in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) region. Founded in 1958 with 42 branches in the Philippines, Standard Insurance provides motorcar and property insurance in the Philippines. “Now, we can quickly move MySQL to Amazon Aurora, and migrate the rest of our databases later. The compatibility advantage of Aurora with MySQL will allow us to migrate and be online at an accelerated pace, as there will be no changes required on our MySQL-based applications,” said Kenneth Pinpin, Chief Technology Officer, Standard Insurance.
VietJet Air, an international airline based in Vietnam, currently runs their mobile website and applications on AWS Cloud. “We have been exploring Amazon Aurora as an option to migrate our legacy databases. We are thrilled it’s finally available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) region,” said Khanh Ho, Head of Innovation at VietJet Aviation.
Amazon Partner Network (APN) Partners across Asia Pacific also welcomed the availability of Amazon Aurora in Southeast Asia. The APN includes tens of thousands of independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) around the world, with APN Partner participation in Asia growing significantly during the past 12 months. APN Partners build innovative solutions and services on the AWS Cloud. The APN network provides partners with business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market (GTM) support.
