Amazon Web Services – Getting Started with Amazon Aurora March 2016
Page 4 of 25
Migration with Minimal Downtime 22
Conclusion 23
Contributors 23
Further Reading 24
Abstract
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible, enterprise-grade relational database
engine built for the cloud.
In many ways, Amazon Aurora is a game changer and
helps overcome the limitations of traditional relational database engines. The
goal of this whitepaper is to help you understand the benefits of Amazon Aurora
and to walk you through the steps required to create and connect to your first
Amazon Aurora database. This whitepaper will also cover Amazon Aurora
architecture, scalability, performance, and migration paths from other databases.
Introduction
Cloud adoption among enterprises is growing quickly, with many adopting a
cloud-first strategy. Relational databases like MySQL, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL
Server are still a critical part of most enterprise solutions and figure prominently
in the considerations while planning for an enterprise cloud migration. With
respect to database migrations, the focus is changing from a “lift and shift”
approach to migrating (that is, migrating as-is and running databases on virtual
servers in the cloud) to fully managed, cloud-native database services like
Amazon Aurora.
The primary reason for this trend is because traditional databases are not
designed to take full advantage of the key benefits of the cloud like scalability,
reliability, performance, and so on. Most traditional databases have been built
and optimized for on-premises environments, and the fundamentals of their
architecture have not changed much in the last few decades.
One of the key objectives of Amazon Aurora is to overcome the performance,
scalability, and availability limitations of traditional databases in a cost-effective
manner similar to open-source databases. Amazon uses service-oriented
