One of the big announcements at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2014 conference this week was the unveiling of Aurora. The result of years of internal work, Aurora, currently in preview, is a MySQL 5.6-compatible option that “combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases” on the AWS infrastructure. The Aurora database engine will be made available through the Amazon RDS for Aurora service. This new database option is another example of the vibrant innovation coming from the MySQL ecosystem and key role that relational databases play in applications of today and tomorrow.
Since the Aurora relational database engine will only be made available as a service via RDS, Amazon Web Services can do some interesting new things including:
In the keynote, Amazon Web Services shared that Aurora delivers up to five times the performance of stock MySQL 5.6 without requiring any changes to most MySQL applications. Their FAQ reveals some insights into their testing methodology: “Amazon Aurora delivers over 500,000 SELECTs/sec and 100,000 updates/sec, five times higher than MySQL running the same benchmark on the same hardware.”
We’re very excited about Amazon pushing the boundaries in relational databases for the enterprise and look forward to see what we, as a MySQL community, can learn from their new cloud-centric and cross-service approach.
Like many, Percona is looking forward to trying out Aurora. We’ll definitely do some benchmark testing to compare additional database options such as a tuned Percona Server 5.6. Additionally, we’ll share our expert advice and ideas for improvement that we uncover from our testing of RDS for Aurora back to the team at AWS so the service becomes better for all.
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