Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced that its Aurora database engine is now generally available to customers. Aurora can power the existing Relational Database Service (RDS), and is compatible with MySQL and MariaDB databases.
Aurora increases the performance of the RDS. It ensures 6 million inserts per minute and 30 million selects per minute, Amazon said when Aurora was first announced at the AWS re:Invent conference in November. But Amazon wants to offer this performance at a price that beats demands from relational database vendors. So it built Aurora in-house. AWS customers can also call on MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL as database engines when using RDS.
The general availability of Aurora is in keeping with Amazon’s efforts to build software that companies can use as alternatives to the tools commercially available on AWS. Amazon has a wide variety of other home-built offerings, including the DynamoDB NoSQL database, the Redshift data warehouse, and most recently, the API Gateway for management of companies’ application programming interfaces (APIs).