Why Isn’t Amazon Aurora More Popular? Examining It’s Capabilities
At Paragon Cloud Consulting, we have worked with a variety of businesses spanning across multiple industries, each with different database needs. Amazon Aurora is an incredible product that offers high performance, managed database solutions for clients looking to build an application for scale.
Amazon Aurora is comparable to MySQL/PostgreSQL and built for the cloud to combine the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. It provides up to five times better performance than the typical MySQL implementation at one-tenth the cost. Aurora also offers up to 15 low-latency read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3 and replication across three Availability Zones.
With these incredible features, you might be wondering why Amazon Aurora isn’t more widely used, especially by large enterprises running database-driven applications. While Amazon Aurora usage is growing, traditional commercial databases from vendors like Oracle, Microsoft and IBM still dominate the market. Let’s unpack why that is.
Why Isn’t Everyone Using Amazon Aurora?
Despite strong capabilities, not every company that in needs of a SQL Database solution is using Aurora. Amazon has spent a lot of money marketing this product, but there’s a few key reasons why it’s not trending. One major factor contributing to this is inertia of existing investments.
Many large companies have made substantial investments in legacy databases like Oracle and have established teams and processes supporting those databases. Migrating at scale is daunting requiring significant time, cost, and risk. This inertia to stick with existing systems slows enterprise adoption of new alternatives. This is especially the case with enterprises who have built their applications using legacy, on premises technology prior to the cloud being widely used.
Despite this, Aurora usage is accelerating amongst born-in-the-cloud companies unencumbered by legacy tech investments. Prominent adopters include Netflix, Expedia, Capital One, and Amazon itself. So let’s go into detail about what makes it so special.
Key Benefits of Amazon Aurora
As a disclosure, Amazon Aurora isn’t free and it isn’t cheap… but, in the long run, no database solution is. Unlike most database solutions that come with minimal capabilities that you pay to expand, Aurora comes with these performance modifications already built in. This is what makes Amazon Aurora the perfect option for future thinking companies who know their product will need to scale. Now, back to the benefits of Aurora…
Performance
The high IOPS and low latency of Aurora’s all-SSD architecture provides immense performance for applications needing fast responses. For perspective, SSDs provide 100–1000x more IOPS than traditional magnetic hard drives. This translates to vastly faster performance for reading and writing data. Not every database architecture is built this way and that’s what makes it special.
High Availability
Aurora stores copies of your data across multiple physical resources for built-in redundancy. Combined with instant failover to replicas, this makes robust, fault-tolerant deployments much simpler and cost-effective.
By default, Aurora stores 3 read replicas across multiple avaliability zones, which can be expanded up to 16. It also has custom endpoints to these read replicas, which other databases do not offer. This allows you to scale up your database as your user base expands without growing pains and offer fool-proof architecture.
Let’s compare this to MySQL managed through RDS. MySQL is slightly cheaper, not counting the dev time, but only comes with a single database in one AZ, which means you pay for that additional redundancy as an add-on. Also, if this redundancy isn’t enabled because of a mistake and a database goes down, oops… you’re out of luck.
Agility
Aurora offers DevOps-friendly capabilities like fast cloning, point-in-time restores, and zero-downtime patching enable greater agility for developers. It can run serverless so you don’t have to manage compute and also offers Multi Master Mode.
In case you aren’t familiar with the term “serverless”, let’s dig into it. The serverless option allows only paying for database capacity needed per second, automatically scaling up and down based on demand. This optimizes costs for workloads with intermittent usage.
Multi Master is a huge benefit for anyone looking to scale out their database because it allows not just read replication, but WRITE replication. Let’s say your database is experiencing downtime during an active part of the day where trasactions are being written to your database. Multi Master let’s you re-route to another cluster node easily, giving you fault tolerance, and your users won’t even notice anything has happened! Other SQL Databases experience huge delays when this occurs.
Security
Aurora provides encryption, fine-grained access controls, and handles security tasks like patching, firewalls, and DDoS protection. It also integrated seemlessly with Amazons Key Management system to rotate access to your database without any security concerns.
For the right use cases, Aurora delivers transformational capabilities vs traditional databases. Companies embracing cloud-native infrastructure stand to benefit greatly.
When to Consider Amazon Aurora
If you are a company analyzing your database options and you have landed on a SQL Database being the best fit for you, consider Aurora. This database option can deliver hard-to-achieve capabilities that transform the possibilities. The key is choosing the right tool for your needs, not blind adherence to legacy technology.
For the right application, Aurora can be a game changer. Its high performance and scalability make it well suited for large, fast growing web and mobile apps. Companies leveraging modern application architectures and technologies like containers and microservices can benefit tremendously. If your application needs to handle immense workloads across multiple data centers, Aurora should definitely be on your short list.
At Paragon, we’ve successfully deployed Aurora for many client projects over the past several years and have been consistently impressed with its capabilities. When coupled with best practices around cloud-based infrastructure, Aurora has proven both powerful and cost-effective, while alleviating the headaches of managing commercial databases.
Of course, Aurora isn’t necessarily the best choice for every application. Selecting the right database always requires thorough analysis of requirements, existing infrastructure, team skills, and other factors. But for a wide variety of modern, cloud-native use cases, Aurora merits serious consideration.
If you have an upcoming project and are wondering if Amazon Aurora or another database option is the right choice, please reach out to us through our website. With our extensive experience designing, building and operating databases in the cloud, we’re happy to provide guidance on the pros and cons of various solutions for your specific needs.
