Amazon Aurora - A Boost on Standard MySQL
Updated March 27, 2023
Amazon Aurora - A Boost on Standard MySQL
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Aurora
Cloud services are the trend. No infrastructure costs and no worries. Cloud databases are also the trend, as they can be easily scalable and upgraded. As a senior consultant I recently configured an Amazon Aurora database to serve as the back-end of an organization software. This software included a main server providing services for mobile applications and also as a back-office web application to manage transaction information. These services relied on the Amazon Aurora database to collect and save information. Customer needed a database accessible from everywhere, with high availability, fast, always up to date and scalable as it was expected the business to grow as well as its storage needs. The Amazon Aurora turned out to be a stable solution with high performance when compared with in-house solutions like MySQL.
- Amazon Aurora has high availability, since the customer started to use it, the database never had to be left out of service.
- Amazon Aurora provides frequent and automated upgrades, which makes our database system always up to date on the latest features and security practices
- Since Amazon Aurora uses MySQL as its core database, it is very easy to find specialized people to work. Amazon’s relational database management system also makes it very easy to expand and create new databases
- The cost of Amazon Aurora when compared to a simple MySQL instance is considerably higher, so we really need to look at and run some performance tests to compare if the performance improvements are worth the extra cost.
- Although backup restores are a rare feature to use, when we need them it is always painful to restore our data. We are always searching for a database service to provide new and innovating features in terms of data recovery. For instance, being able to search on backup information to see if the needed data is there. It is a very common need to compare the hot data with the backup data, for example to fix some database data that a malfunction application wrongly updated.
- Since aurora is an Amazon relational database service there is no way to run a dev database on a local storage for tests and development.
- The customers where we implemented Amazon Aurora database don't need to have an employee specialized in features and security upgrades.
- The database replication and schedule for backup tasks are much easier, so less prone to errors.
- We have never had a database downtime on our applications, which is essential for our customer business.
Unlike proprietary solutions like Microsoft SQL Server, Amazon Aurora does not need proprietary licensing, so we can use this budget to get cloud solutions with high availability and performance, at a similar rate. When compared to MySQL or Postgres SQL, it allows us to have a database system always updated with the most current features and security best practices without having to worry about it. In normal database systems like MySQL to keep the database system up to date we need to have someone always looking for new upgrades.
As it relies on MySQL there is no extra formation for a team that is already used to a MySQL solution.
Using Amazon Aurora
25 - Amazon Aurora e mainly used by IT team. We use it as our infrastructure data backbone, mainly due to its high availability and reliability. Recently we have also been exploring serverless solution within our IT Team allowing to have high performance always when needed, and, at the same time, save resources. We are a manufacturing organization with several factories where we are deploying IOT solutions. Amazon Aurora works great as an IOT repository because it really can handle large volumes of data and real-time processing. We are using Amazon Aurora together with Amazon Greengrass to help to identify machine problems in our factories before they become a large problem.
10 - Different skills are needed to support Amazon Aurora. We have AWS specialist who take care of our AWS infrastructure and keep up with the latest trends and updates from AWS. Together with our infrastructure and security team, they ensure all updates are up-to-date, as well as looking at the infrastructure performance, alerting for eventual performance peaks, or bad behaved queries. Then, of course, our developers team who use it as a database system, and are also responsible for its performance overall.
- Warehouse Management Application - Used to manage warehouse. we manage stocks, inventories, movements, stock allocation and user tasks.
- Integrations Logs repository - We have a very demanding integration system, with millions of logs generated each day. Amazon Aurora is where we store that data.
- IOT data lake - We use Amazon Aurora as our IOT repository. It can handle large volumes of data with real-time processing.
- Predictive maintenance plans - Our IOT environment collects millions of data entries per day, from hundreds of sensors. With that information stored in Amazon Aurora, together with Amazon Greengrass we are able to identify trends on machine malfunctions, and predict at some level, when a machine is going out of the usual behavior trend.
- Sales prediction - we have some ongoing projects that intend to catch sales trends, allowing us to have a better stock management system, better stock reposition and to avoid stock outages. We will rely on Amazon Aurora speed to analyze millions of historic sales.