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RDS Aurora MySQL
RDS Aurora MySQL Basics
Amazon’s proprietary fork of MySQL intended to scale up for high concurrency workloads. Generally speaking, individual query performance under Aurora is not expected to improve significantly relative to MySQL or MariaDB, but Aurora is intended to maintain performance while executing many more queries concurrently than an equivalent MySQL or MariaDB server could handle.
Log-structured storage instead of B-trees to improve write performance.
Out-of-process buffer pool so that databases instances can be restarted without clearing the buffer pool.
The underlying physical storage is a specialized SSD array that automatically maintains 6 copies of your data across 3 AZs.
Aurora read replicas share the storage layer with the write master which significantly reduces replica lag, eliminates the need for the master to write and distribute the binary log for replication, and allows for zero-data-loss failovers from the master to a replica. The master and all the read replicas that share storage are known collectively as an Aurora cluster. Read replicas can span up to 5 regions.
RDS Aurora MySQL Tips
In order to take advantage of Aurora’s higher concurrency, applications should be configured with large database connection pools and should execute as many queries concurrently as possible. For example, Aurora servers have been tested to produce increasing performance on some OLTP workloads with up to 5,000 connections.
The easiest migration path to Aurora is restoring a database snapshot from MySQL 5.6 or 5.7. The next easiest method is restoring a dump from a MySQL-compatible database such as MariaDB. For low-downtime migrations from other MySQL-compatible databases, you can set up an Aurora instance as a replica of your existing database. If none of those methods are options, Amazon offers a fee-based data migration service.
Because Aurora read replicas are the equivalent of a multi-AZ backup and they can be configured as zero-data-loss failover targets, there are fewer scenarios in which the creation of a multi-AZ Aurora instance is required.
RDS Aurora MySQL Gotchas and Limitations
🔸Aurora 1.x is based on MySQL 5.6.x with some cherry-picking of later MySQL features. It is missing most 5.7 features as well as some online DDL features introduced in 5.6.17.