AWS launches Aurora via Singapore cloud region

Amazon Web Services has announced the availability of Amazon Aurora in the AWS Asia Pacific (Singapore) region.

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible database engine for the Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) that aims to combine the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

Amazon Aurora provides up to five times better performance than the typical MySQL and is three times faster than standard PostgreSQL databases. Customers pay a simple hourly charge for each Amazon Aurora database instance they use and Amazon Aurora can automatically scale storage capacity with no downtime or performance degradation.

“Historically, customers have had to choose between performance and price when evaluating database solutions. Our customers have consistently told us that they wished for an easier way to get the performance of commercial databases, at the price of open source engines,” said Nick Walton, Managing Director, ASEAN, AWS.

“Amazon Aurora is a database engine that gives customers the best of both worlds – the performance and availability of the highest-grade commercial databases at a cost more commonly associated with open source.”

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% durability without performance impact.

Amazon Aurora is designed to offer greater than 99.99% availability, and to 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.