Amazon Aurora is a hosted relational database service developed and offered by Amazon. Aurora is available as part of the Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Although it is a proprietary technology, it is based on the open-source MySQL database.
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Key features
Aurora does not require the user to provision database storage, as it automatically allocates storage in 10-gigabyte increments, as needed, up to a maximum of 64 terabytes. Aurora offers automatic, six-way replication of those 10-gigabyte chunks across multiple locations for improved availability and fault-tolerance. Aurora also provides users with more comprehensive performance metrics, such as query throughput and latency, as compared to other RDS database engines.
Comparison and compatibility with MySQL
Amazon designed Aurora to be compatible with MySQL, meaning that tools for querying or managing MySQL databases (such as the mysql command-line client and the MySQL Workbench graphical user-interface) work with Amazon Aurora databases as well. Not all MySQL options and features are available, however: as of September 2016, Amazon Aurora is only compatible with one version of MySQL (5.6), and supports only InnoDB as a storage engine.
Performance
Amazon claims fivefold performance improvements on benchmarking tests, due to "tightly integrating the database engine with an SSD-based virtualized storage layer purpose-built for database workloads, reducing writes to the storage system, minimizing lock contention and eliminating delays created by database process threads". Other independent tests have shown that Aurora performs better than competing technologies on some, but not all, combinations of workload and instance type.