Amazon Aurora, the fastest growing service in AWS history, is now fully compatible with both MySQL and PostgreSQL, delivering the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases at one-tenth the cost
Over a thousand customers, including Verizon, Capital One, FINRA, Fannie Mae, C3 IOT, Urban Airship, FantasyDraft, BMC, Blackboard, and Nielsen, participated in the preview, battle-testing PostgreSQL compatibility for Amazon Aurora and running millions of hours against their real-world application workloads
SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Oct. 24, 2017– Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced general availability for Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility. Amazon Aurora is a cloud-optimized relational database that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. Now, customers who use PostgreSQL databases can get up to several times better performance with scalability, durability, availability, and security as good as or better than commercial databases–all at one-tenth the cost. With no upfront costs or commitments required, customers pay a simple hourly charge for each Amazon Aurora database instance they use, and can automatically scale storage capacity with no downtime or performance degradation. AWS also announced that customers migrating to Amazon Aurora from another database can use the AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) free of charge for the next six months. To get started with Amazon Aurora, visit https://aws.amazon.com/aurora
Historically, customers have had to choose between performance and price when evaluating database solutions. Commercial databases offer high performance and advanced availability features, but are expensive, complex to manage, have high lock-in, and come with punitive licensing terms. Open source databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL require less capital expense, but customers often find they cannot achieve the performance or availability of commercial databases. Amazon Aurora offers the best of both worlds–the performance and availability of the highest-grade commercial databases at a cost more commonly associated with open source. And, with more and more enterprises embracing PostgreSQL for its user-defined functions and data types, complex SQL support, NoSQL and JSON support, broad application language support, and closer semantics to some of the old guard databases, Amazon Aurora’s PostgreSQL launch comes at a great time for customers looking to break free of the cost and complexity of traditional commercial databases.
“When we made Amazon Aurora available in 2015, for the first time, customers had a cost-effective and high performance alternative to commercial databases like Oracle and SQL Server–and this is a big part of why Amazon Aurora is the fastest-growing service in the history of AWS,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Databases, Analytics, and Machine Learning, AWS. “While we’ve been amazed at the growth of Amazon Aurora’s MySQL-compatible edition, many of our enterprise customers anxious to move on from their old world database providers have been waiting for Amazon Aurora’s PostgreSQL-compatible edition to launch into general availability. We’re excited to help these customers take another step toward database freedom.”
Amazon Aurora delivers up to several times better performance compared to standard MySQL and PostgreSQL by using a variety of software and hardware techniques to ensure the database is able to fully leverage available compute, memory, and networking resources. Amazon Aurora storage scales automatically, growing and rebalancing Input and Outputs (I/O) across the fleet to provide consistent performance. For example, a customer can start with a database of 10GB and have it automatically grow up to 64TB, without requiring any downtime. Amazon Aurora is highly available and durable, automatically replicating data across multiple Availability Zones and continuously backing up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which is designed for 99.999999999 percent durability. 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 30 seconds, without crashing 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.
Capital One, a leading information-based technology company and digital banking innovator, has taken a cloud-first approach to software development. “At Capital One, our cloud-first approach led us to start testing the preview of Amazon Aurora’s PostgreSQL compatibility in November 2016,” said John Andrukonis, Chief Architect, Capital One. “We anticipated performance benefits, as well as the high availability and fast failover capabilities ideal for serving our customers. In our testing during the preview, we’ve been impressed with the performance and high availability offered by Amazon Aurora.”
FINRA regulates a critical part of the securities industry – brokerage firms doing business with the public in the United States. FINRA takes in up to 75 billion market events per day that are tracked, aggregated, and analyzed for the purpose of protecting investors. “FINRA is in the process of migrating most of our relational databases to AWS,” said Saman Michael Far, Senior Vice President & CTO, FINRA. “We have evaluated Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility, and we look forward to increasing our usage, because PostgreSQL is the best destination for our relational database workloads.”
INRIX is the global leader in connected car services and transportation analytics, a new approach that leverages big data and the cloud to help manage urban mobility. “From raw GPS points, INRIX generates large-scale vehicle movement data and ingests the data into sharded Amazon Relational Database Service for PostgreSQL instances. We are hitting the storage and performance limits per shard and looking for a more scalable solution,” said Trang Nguyen, Senior Software Engineer, INRIX. “With Amazon Aurora’s compatibility with PostgreSQL, we’ve seen three times performance improvements in our benchmarks. We love Amazon Aurora’s ability to scale storage independently of computing resources at better price points.”
Nielsen is a global data management company providing a comprehensive understanding of consumer behaviors. “In our testing of Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL in the preview, we have seen very good performance upwards of 7-11 times that of RDS PostgreSQL, for both write and read/write workloads,” said Todd Lightbody, Watch Architecture Leader, Nielson. “We are also excited about the expected scalability and reliability, giving us great confidence that Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL will meet our requirements as we move some of our core database workloads to AWS.”
Verizon is a global leader delivering innovative communications and technology solutions. “Verizon is helping our customers build a better, more connected life. As part of this journey, we are undergoing a major transformation in our database management approach, moving away from expensive, legacy commercial database solutions to more efficient and cost-effective options,” said Shashidhar Sureban, Associate Director, Database Engineering, Verizon. “Testing of Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL showed better performance over standard PostgreSQL residing on Amazon EC2 instances, and the AWS Database Migration Service and Schema Conversion Tool were found effective at identifying areas for data-conversion that required special attention during migration.”
FantasyDraft is a daily fantasy sports site offering fantasy play across multiple sports and contest formats including leagues, head-to-head contests and tournaments. “We’ve been extensively testing the preview of the new Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL engine, and have been very impressed with overall compatibility with standard PostgreSQL, along with the ease of migrating our data and applications to Amazon Aurora’s new engine to obtain improved performance, scalability and resiliency,” said Tim Weisbrod, FantasyDraft Co-Founder and President. “We are most excited about improved performance under high concurrency workloads to ensure our users have the best experience possible in the final minutes leading up to when contests start. We’re also looking forward to the rapid crash recovery and fast failover capabilities of Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL to ensure any potential disruptions to our customers are minimized, and to Amazon Aurora read replica scale-out and dynamic auto-scaling storage to help us dynamically add resources to cover the busiest times and reduce costs when they aren’t needed.”
OpenSCG is one of the leading solutions partners in the PostgreSQL community. “We have been testing the preview of Amazon Aurora’s PostgreSQL compatibility as part of our goal of helping enterprises successfully move from expensive on-premises commercial relational databases to PostgreSQL,” said Denis Lussier, CEO of OpenSCG. “We are impressed with the PostgreSQL compatibility, the performance, and the high availability, and we are working with multiple customers to give them all the assistance they need to move their Oracle database workloads to Amazon Aurora. It is truly amazing how quickly people are moving past the Oracle RAC objection that I’ve seen for the last 15 years when they hear how Amazon Aurora works. It’s a game changer for sure.”
SRA OSS is part of SRA Inc., one of Japan’s oldest and largest systems integration companies. “In our performance testing of Amazon Aurora’s PostgreSQL compatibility, we found that the performance was three times better than standard PostgreSQL,” said Tatsuo Ishii, SRA OSS, Inc. Japan President. “Our testing also showed that Amazon Aurora is fully compatible with PostgreSQL 9.6, and we believe customers will be able to move large enterprise workloads from on-premises commercial databases to Amazon Aurora because of its high performance, high availability, and PostgreSQL compatibility. SRA OSS will add support for Amazon Aurora to the next version of pgpool-II, which provides clustering management middleware for PostgreSQL.”
PostgreSQL compatibility for Amazon Aurora is available as a database engine for Amazon RDS in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) Regions, and will expand to additional Regions in the coming months.
About Amazon Web Services
For 11 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 90 fully featured services for compute, storage, networking, database, analytics, application services, deployment, management, developer, mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), security, hybrid, and enterprise applications, from 44 Availability Zones (AZs) across 16 geographic regions in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the world – including the fastest growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies – to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit https://aws.amazon.com.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.
