AWS Relational Database For Building Scalable and Reliable Enterprise Apps
Let me start this blog by writing about Enterprise Applications, their functions, and their requirements. Enterprise apps help businesses build their core functions. Whenever the terms Enterprise and Applications are used in a single sentence, it generally refers to a complex software platform which is too large for individuals and small businesses to use. Examples for such apps are the ones used by e-commerce stores, banks and finances, healthcare, and travel companies. Now by looking at the above examples, you must have already got an idea about the features that an enterprise app must possess, which are high availability, scalability and disaster recovery, high performance and security.
In a traditional IT environment, old proprietary enterprise applications are used which are difficult to manage considering the licensing and also these apps are expensive. Because of these issues, companies are moving onto open databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis. Furthermore, customers can modernize their enterprise applications using Amazon Aurora. It’s a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database which has the best of both worlds, which means it has the performance and availability of traditional databases and also the cost-effectiveness of open source databases.
You can read more about Amazon Aurora here. One of the most attractive features of Aurora is its pay-as-you-go pricing.
Another reason for enterprises moving to cloud-based DB solutions is automation. Many administrative tasks like fail-over, backup and recovery, isolation and security, and monitoring can be automated with the help of AWS. Also, read replicas in Amazon RDS provides better performance and durability for the data in DB instances. You can create replicas of your data from source DB instance and serve it to for high-data volume traffic, hence increasing aggregate read throughput. Thus we can bring data close to the customer’s applications in different regions.
I would like to also mention about Aurora Serverless here. If we have them configured, then DB instances get started on demand and also they are shut down automatically when not in use. It scales up/down automatically which doesn’t affect the customer application at all. The pricing is similar to other AWS services, as in, it’s pay per second.
Tasks such as provisioning, patching, backup, recovery, failure detection, and repair can be automated by using Aurora. It offers 99.99% availability with self-healing storage which means any disk failures are rectified in the background without any data loss.
Another advantage of using RDS which I found out while working on AWS, is that we can provision a multi-AZ database. In such an environment, we can have an exact replica of our main DB in another availability zone, which acts as a failover DB. So in case, we have a failure in our main database, which in itself is a highly unlikely occurrence, we can divert the traffic to the failover database almost instantaneously and thus keeping our application up and running. Did I also mention that regular snapshots can also be taken of the RDS instance? Yes, snapshots can be taken whenever we need it and this also helps in DB upgrade. Suppose after an upgrade, we decide to rollback the changes, it’s still possible.
So, why move to Aurora? Below are some salient features:
-> Higher performance of up to 5 times-> Better availability and durability-> Cost reduction of up to 60%-> Easy migration with no application change
Moving to Aurora results in better customer experience, cost savings for businesses and substantial performance improvements.
Conclusion
I hope this short blog on the advantages and functions of Enterprise Apps and AWS RDS was informative for you and would help you in some way. Kindly share your views in the comments section.
