Explain the features of Amazon Aurora

Recipe Objective - Explain the features of Amazon Aurora?

The Amazon Aurora is widely used and defined as a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud which combines the performance and availability of the traditional enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of the open-source databases. Amazon Aurora is up to five times faster than the standard MySQL databases and three times faster than the standard PostgreSQL databases. Amazon Aurora provides the security, availability, and reliability of the commercial databases at 1/10th the cost. Amazon Aurora is fully managed by the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), which automates time-consuming administration tasks like hardware provisioning, database setup, patching, and backups. Amazon Aurora features a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that further auto-scales up to the 128TB per database instance. It also delivers high performance and availability with up to 15 low-latency read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across the three Availability Zones. Amazon Aurora automatically allocates the database storage space in the 10-gigabyte increments, as needed, up to the maximum of 128 terabytes. Amazon Aurora further offers automatic, six-way replication of those chunks across three Availability Zones for improved availability and fault tolerance. Amazon Aurora provides users with the performance metrics, such as query throughput and latency. It provides fast database cloning. Amazon Aurora Multi-Master allows the creation of multiple read-write instances in an Aurora database across multiple Availability Zones, which enables the uptime-sensitive applications to further achieve continuous write availability through instance failure.

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Benefits of Amazon Aurora

• The Amazon Aurora provides multiple levels of security for users' databases. These include network isolation using the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud(VPC), encryption at the rest using keys users create and control through the AWS Key Management Service (KMS) and encryption of data in transit using SSL. On an encrypted Amazon Aurora instance, data in the underlying storage is further encrypted, as are the automated backups, snapshots, and replicas in the same cluster and thus is highly secure. Amazon Aurora is designed to offer users 99.99% availability, replicating 6 copies of their data across 3 Availability Zones and backing up user's data continuously to Amazon S3. It transparently recovers from the physical storage failures, instance failover typically takes less than 30 seconds and users can also backtrack within seconds to a previous point in time to recover from the user errors. With Global Database, a single Aurora database can further span multiple AWS Regions to enable fast local reads and a quick disaster recovery thus offering High availability and durability. Amazon Aurora is known to be fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) and users no longer need to worry about database management tasks such as hardware provisioning, software patching, setup, configuration, or backups. Amazon Aurora automatically and continuously monitors and backs up users' databases to Amazon S3, enabling granular point-in-time recovery. Users can monitor database performance using the Amazon CloudWatch, Enhanced Monitoring, or Performance Insights, an easy-to-use tool that helps users quickly detect performance problems and thus offers a fully managed service. The Amazon Aurora database engine is fully compatible with the existing MySQL and PostgreSQL open source databases and adds support for new releases regularly and users can easily migrate MySQL or PostgreSQL databases to Amazon Aurora using the standard MySQL or PostgreSQL import/export tools or snapshots. It also means the code, applications, drivers, and tools users already use with their existing databases can be used with Amazon Aurora with little or no change and thus offers MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility.

System Requirements

• Any Operating System(Mac, Windows, Linux)

This recipe explains Amazon Aurora and the Features of Amazon Aurora.

Features of Amazon Aurora

• It provides Push-Button Compute Scaling and Storage Auto-Scaling

Amazon Aurora provides push-button compute scaling and storage auto-scaling. Using the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) APIs or with a few clicks in AWS Management Console, Users can scale the compute and memory resources powering their deployment up or down. Compute scaling operations are typically complete in a few minutes. Also, Amazon Aurora automatically increases the size of users' defined database volume as its storage needs grow. Their volume expands in increments of 10 GB up to a maximum of 128 TB and users don't need to provide excess storage for their database to handle future growth.

• It provides Serverless Configuration and Custom Database Endpoints

Amazon Aurora Serverless is an on-demand, auto-scaling configuration for Aurora where the database automatically starts up shuts down, and further scales capacity up or down based on their application's needs. It allows running the user's database in the cloud without managing any database instances. Also, Custom endpoints allow users to distribute and load balance workloads across different sets of database instances. For eg, users can provision a set of Aurora Replicas to use an instance type with higher memory capacity to run an analytics workload. A custom endpoint can then help route the workload to these appropriately configured instances while keeping other instances isolated from it.

• It provides Parallel Query

Amazon Aurora Parallel Query provides faster analytical queries as compared to the current data. It can further speed up the queries by up to two orders of magnitude while maintaining high throughput for the core transaction workload. By pushing query processing down to the Aurora storage layer, it gains a large amount of computing power while further reducing network traffic. Use Parallel Query to run the transactional and analytical workloads alongside each other in the same Aurora database.

• It provides Instance Monitoring and Repair

Amazon Aurora database health is continuously monitored by RDS and underlying Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance. In the event of database failure, Amazon RDS will automatically restart the database and associated processes. Amazon Aurora does not even require the crash recovery replay of the database redo logs and thereby greatly reducing restart times. It further isolates the database buffer cache from database processes, allowing the cache to survive a database restart.

• It provides Multi-AZ Deployments with Aurora Replicas and Global Database

Amazon Aurora uses the Amazon RDS Multi-AZ technology, in event of instance failure, to automate the failover to one of up to 15 Amazon Aurora Replicas users have created in any of three Availability Zones and if no Amazon Aurora Replicas have been provisioned, in the case of a failure, Amazon RDS will attempt to create the new Amazon Aurora DB instance for the user automatically. It minimizes the failover time with the AWS JDBC Driver for MySQL, an open-source driver which can be used as a drop-in replacement for the MySQL Connector/J driver. Amazon Aurora database span multiple AWS regions to further enable fast local reads and quick disaster recovery. Global Database uses storage-based replication to replicate the database across multiple AWS Regions, with typical latency of less than one second. Users can use the secondary region as the backup option in case users need to recover quickly from the regional degradation or outage. A database in a secondary region can be promoted to full read/write capabilities in less than 1 minute.

• It provides Database Snapshots and Network Isolation

Amazon Aurora provides database snapshots. DB Snapshots are user-initiated backups of user instance stored in the Amazon S3 that will be kept until the user explicitly delete them. They leverage the automated incremental snapshots to reduce the time and storage required and users can create a new instance from a DB Snapshot whenever they desire. Amazon Aurora runs in the Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), which allows users to isolate the database in their virtual network, and connect to their on-premises IT infrastructure using industry-standard encrypted IPsec VPNs. In addition, using Amazon RDS, users can configure firewall settings and control the network access to their DB Instances.