Aurora

Introduction

• AWS propriety database technology compatible with Postgres and Mysql
• 5x performance improvement over MySql, 3x performance improvement over Postgres
• Storage automatically grows, starts at 10GB, grows up to 128 TB
• Up to 15 read replicas, replication process is faster than MySql
• Failover is instantaneous, HA is native to Aurora
• About 25% more expensive than RDS

Aurora High Availability

• 6 copies of your data across 3 AZ:
  • 4 copies out of 6 need to be available for writes
  • 3 copies out of 6 need to be available for reads
• Self-healing with peer-to-peer replication
• Stored is striped across 100 volumes
• Only one instance will take writes at a time, failover within 30 seconds
  • You can optionally enable “Local Write Forwarding” to forward writes from a read replica to a write replica
• Supports cross region replication
• Reader endpoint is load balanced across all read replicas. Writer endpoint points to the current writer instance

Aurora Security

• If the master is not encrypted, read replicas cannot be encrypted
• To encrypt an unencrypted database, create a db snapshot and restore as encrypted