Aurora

• Amazon Aurora (Aurora) is a fully managed
relational database engine
• Uses a base entity called a cluster
• A cluster consists of a primary instance and zero
or more replicas
• Replicas can be used for read operations
• You can have a maximum of 15 replicas per
cluster

No local storage- uses a shared volume storage for instances in the cluster
Shared storage are SSD based with a max size of 128 TIB
High IOPs and very low latency
It has six storage replicas across multiple availability zones
Data is replicated synchronously across the availability zones
You do not provision the amount of storage you want to use, you are billed for what you use

• High water mark –billed for what is most used*
• Storage which is freed up can be reused*
• Accessed using 2 types of endpoints
• The Cluster endpoint and reader endpoint
• Cluster endpoint always points at the primary instance and that is used for read and
write operations
• The reader endpoint also points at the replicas for read operations
• As new replicas are being added, they are automatically added to the reader endpoints
and traffic is balanced across the replicas automatically

• No free tier
• Backups/Snapshots are just like what is in RDS
• Backtrack can be used which allow in-place rewinds to a previous
point in time
• Fast Clone helps create a new database much faster than copying all
the data

Aurora Serverless
• Uses the concept of ACU- Aurora Capacity Units
• It represents a certain amount of compute /amount of memory used.
• So you set a minimum and maximum ACU value and Aurora will scale between those
values by adding or removing capacity based on the load placed on it.
• It can even go down to zero and be paused meaning you are only billed for the storage
consumed.

Use cases
• Infrequently used applications
• New applications where you are unsure of the usage
• Variable/unpredictable workloads

Aurora Global Databases
• Allows global level replication using Aurora from a master region to
up to 5 regions
• 1s or less replication between regions, asynchronous
• No impact on DB performance because replication is done at storage
level
• Secondary regions can have 16 replicas
• Can be promoted to read/write instance

Aurora Multi- Master
• Default Aurora is Single Master, One
R/W instance and other Read only
replicas
• In multi-master mode all instances are
Read/Write Instances
• Fault tolerant architectures