SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases, is now available to all customers. More than a thousand AWS customers, including global enterprises and startups from a range of industries, participated in the preview and saw that Amazon Aurora can provide up to five times better performance than the typical MySQL database, and availability as good or better than commercial databases – at one-tenth the cost. These customers also found Amazon Aurora has the scalability, durability, and reliability to run the most demanding enterprise and Internet-scale applications – everything from massive Internet of Things (IoT) applications to mission-critical e-commerce sites. To get started with Amazon Aurora, visit http://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora.
Historically, customers have had to trade off critical capabilities like high performance and mission-critical availability with an affordable price when choosing database solutions. With Amazon Aurora, customers get the best of both worlds – the performance and availability of the highest-grade commercial databases at a cost more commonly associated with open source databases. 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 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 is now available as a database engine for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) Regions, and will expand to additional Regions in the coming months. Amazon RDS for MySQL customers can easily convert their existing MySQL databases to Amazon Aurora with one click in the AWS Management Console.
“Today’s commercial-grade databases are expensive, proprietary, high lock-in, and come with punitive licensing terms that these database providers are comfortable employing,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Database Services, AWS. “It’s why we rarely meet enterprises who aren’t looking to escape from their commercial-grade database solution. Now, with Amazon Aurora, companies can get at least the same availability, durability, and security as commercial-grade databases for one-tenth of the cost.”
Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) is one of the largest combination natural gas and electric utilities in the world. “At PG&E, we’re very focused on availability; when our databases are down, it adversely affects service to our gas and electrical customers,” said Edward Wong, Solutions Architect, PG&E. “Using Amazon Aurora, we can run many replicas with millisecond latency. This means during a power event we can handle large surges in traffic and still give our customers timely, up-to-date information. In addition, spreading these replicas across multiple AWS Availability Zones with automatic failover gives us confidence that our databases will be there when we need them.”
Alfresco provides modern content management software built on opens standards that unlocks the power of business-critical content. “Amazon Aurora was able to satisfy all of our scale requirements with no degradation in performance,” said John Newton, Founder and CTO, Alfresco. “With Alfresco on Amazon Aurora we scaled to 1 billion documents with a throughput of 3 million per hour, which is 10 times faster than our MySQL environment. It just works!”
Zumba is a dance fitness program taken daily by over 15 million people around the world. “Our existing MySQL databases perform millions of transactions per day and we expect them to continue to grow,” said Douglas Jarquin, Director of DevOps, Zumba. “Amazon Aurora will give us better performance and scalability than MySQL, as well as lower latency read replicas and we see an opportunity to use Amazon Aurora to improve the latency of our website while also reducing the number of instances required to run it. Best of all, Amazon Aurora’s MySQL-compatibility means that we can use it without making changes to our existing applications.”
Earth Networks operates the world’s largest and most comprehensive weather observation, lightning detection, and climate (GHG) networks. “At Earth Networks we are leveraging our big data smarts to deliver on the promise of IoT and home energy efficiency. Our proprietary networks process over 25 terabytes of real-time data daily, so we need a scalable database that can rapidly grow with our expanding data analysis,” said Eddie Dingels, Lead Architect, Earth Networks. “During our Amazon Aurora preview, we were very impressed with how well Amazon Aurora scaled with our highly concurrent workloads, and how easy it was to move from our current SQL Server databases to Amazon Aurora; all with only a few changes.”
ISCS is a leading provider of core system SaaS solutions for the property and casualty insurance industry. “We project that the size and throughput requirements of our relational databases will more than double year-over-year for the next several years. We need a scaling strategy that delivers reliable performance with growth, yet is simple to operate,” said Doug Moore, CTO & VP, Consumer Experience, ISCS. “Amazon Aurora’s ability to auto-grow database sizes all the way up to 64 TB, as well as provide consistent throughput and latency, is an extremely promising approach to reducing our operational risk.”
WeTransfer is a leading file sharing service, providing a uniquely creative space for people to share files. “At WeTransfer, we currently use Amazon RDS for MySQL to perform millions of transactions per day serving over 70 million worldwide users,” said Dave Forsey, CTO, WeTransfer. “As these numbers continue to accelerate, we will need to find an even more robust data platform. In the Amazon Aurora preview, we have been impressed with Amazon Aurora’s performance, reliability, and manageability and look forward to using it for our production workloads in the future.”
AWS partners, including MariaDB, Tableau, Toad, Webyog, Navicat, and Talend, have certified their products with Amazon Aurora, enabling customers to use the tools they use today without change.
“As an AWS partner, MariaDB is excited that AWS is driving innovation in the MySQL community, just like MariaDB is doing today. Amazon Aurora’s cloud-optimized architecture, which is designed to deliver high performance and high availability, is impressive,” said Monty Widenius, CTO of the MariaDB Foundation and the creator of MySQL. “It is great to see Amazon Aurora aiming to maintain MySQL compatibility such that applications running on MariaDB/MySQL today, either on premises or in the cloud, can run on Amazon Aurora without any change. MariaDB is pleased to make our connectors available for Amazon Aurora, and we look forward to working with the Amazon Aurora team in the future to further accelerate innovation.”
Tableau Software helps people see and understand data. “We ran our compatibility test suites against Amazon Aurora and everything just worked,” said Dan Jewett, Vice President of Product Management at Tableau. “Amazon Aurora paired with Tableau means data users can take advantage of the 5x throughput Amazon Aurora provides and deliver faster analytic insights throughout their organizations. We look forward to offering our Amazon Aurora Tableau connector in the coming weeks.”
About Amazon Web Services
Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services offers a robust, fully featured technology infrastructure platform in the cloud comprised of a broad set of compute, storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services from data center locations in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, China, Germany, Ireland, Japan, and Singapore. More than a million customers, including fast-growing startups, large enterprises, and government agencies across 190 countries, rely on AWS services to innovate quickly, lower IT costs and scale applications globally. To learn more about AWS, visit http://aws.amazon.com.
About Amazon
Amazon.com opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995. The company 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 phone, Fire tablets, Fire TV, and Amazon Echo are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon.
