12.1.16
Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced it has added full PostgreSQL compatibility to Amazon Aurora, the AWS database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. With Amazon Aurora’s new PostgreSQL support, customers can get up to several times better performance than the typical PostgreSQL database and take advantage of the scalability, durability, and security capabilities of Amazon Aurora – all for one-tenth the cost of commercial grade databases. With no upfront costs or commitments required, customers pay a simple hourly charge for each Amazon Aurora database instance they use and can automatically scale storage capacity with no downtime or performance degradation. To learn more about Amazon Aurora, visit https://aws.amazon.com/aurora.
Historically, customers have had to choose between performance and price when evaluating database solutions. Commercial grade databases offer high performance and advanced availability features, but are expensive, complex to manage, have high lock-in, and come with punitive licensing terms. While popular open source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL require less capital expense, customers often find they require extensive tuning and configuration to come close to commercial grade database performance levels. Because Amazon Aurora offers the best of both worlds – the performance and availability of the highest-grade commercial databases at a cost more commonly associated with open source – customers including GE Oil & Gas, Gumi, NASDAQ, Pearson Education, and Zynga have made it the fastest growing service in the history of AWS. With Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL compatibility, the growing number of enterprises that are embracing PostgreSQL for its user-defined functions and data types, complex SQL support, NoSQL and JSON support, and broad application development language support, now have another reason to bring their production databases to AWS and break free from the cost and complexity of traditional commercial grade databases.
“When we made Amazon Aurora available last year, for the first time, customers had a real alternative to commercial databases like Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. And, our release of the AWS Database Migration Service kicked off a mass migration, as customers have used the service to migrate over 14,000 databases this year,” said Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Databases, Analytics, and AI, Amazon Web Services. “Today, Amazon Aurora is powering a wide range of production applications for companies of all sizes and industries – from massive Internet of Things (IoT) applications to mission-critical e-commerce sites. Many customers have told us they would migrate even more of their sophisticated enterprise applications if we made Amazon Aurora compatible with PostgreSQL in addition to MySQL. We are excited to provide this choice to help our customers free themselves from the expensive legacy databases they use today.”
Amazon Aurora delivers up to several times better performance than standard MySQL and PostgreSQL databases by using a variety of software and hardware techniques to ensure the database engine is able to fully leverage available compute, memory, and networking. In addition, Amazon Aurora storage scales automatically, growing and rebalancing Input and Outputs (I/O) across the fleet to provide consistent performance without over-provisioning. For example, a customer can start with a database of 10GB and have it automatically grow up to 64TB, without requiring any downtime. Highly durable and available, Amazon Aurora automatically replicates data across multiple Availability Zones and continuously backs up data to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which is designed for 99.999999999 percent durability without performance impact. Amazon Aurora is designed to offer greater than 99.99 percent availability and automatically detect and recover from most database failures in less than 30 seconds, without crashing or the need to rebuild database caches. Amazon Aurora continually monitors instance health and, if there is a failure, it will automatically failover to a read replica without loss of data.
FINRA regulates all securities firms doing business in the United States, taking in up to 75 billion market events per day that are tracked, aggregated, and analyzed for the purpose of protecting investors. “FINRA is in the process of migrating most of our relational databases to Amazon Web Services,” said Saman Michael Far, Senior Vice President & CTO, FINRA. “We are looking forward to using Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility because PostgreSQL is the best destination for our relational database workloads.”
Fannie Mae is a source of financing for mortgage lenders, providing access to affordable mortgage financing in all markets at all times. “One of our biggest data challenges at Fannie Mae is achieving the fault tolerance and disaster recovery objectives for our databases. The products we use for this in our Oracle environments create maintenance challenges and make our databases less flexible,” says Nate Den Herder, Senior Director of Financial Engineering, Fannie Mae. “This is the key driver behind our switch to Amazon Aurora for new projects in AWS. We have been eagerly awaiting PostgreSQL compatibility in Amazon Aurora so that we can use the automated resiliency across availability zones to solve one of our most difficult engineering challenges, and help us serve our customers better.”
Capital One offers a broad spectrum of financial products and services to consumers, small businesses, and commercial clients through a variety of channels. “At Capital One, we are taking a cloud first approach to all new development, and our use of the AWS Cloud helps us to focus our efforts on innovations that directly benefit our customers,” said Diane Lye, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Data Services and Enterprise Architecture, Capital One. “The introduction of PostgreSQL compatibility for Amazon Aurora supports our needs as it provides an AWS offering for large-scale relational database management systems, with sufficient capacity to handle our massive operational workloads, as well as the performance, availability, and fast-failover capabilities we need to serve our customers.”
Infor is one of the world’s leading providers of enterprise applications, with more than 90,000 customers in more than 170 countries, and is all-in on AWS for the Infor CloudSuite product family. “We went all-in on AWS in March 2014 to help us focus our resources on innovations in our enterprise applications,” said Brian Rose, Senior Vice President, Infor. “PostgreSQL is a linchpin in our strategy to migrate away from costly and high maintenance commercial database platforms, and we are excited to leverage the PostgreSQL compatibility in Amazon Aurora to offer our customers an alternative database platform underneath our applications.”
C3 IoT provides a high-productivity enterprise machine learning application development platform with their applications applying advanced machine learning to recommend actions based on real-time analysis of petabyte-scale data sets, dozens of enterprise and extraprise data sources, and telemetry data from hundreds of millions of endpoints. “Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility provides C3 IoT with the opportunity to scale relational-based workloads in the C3 IoT Platform to much higher levels, providing better performance and higher availability at lower costs,” said Houman Behzadi, Chief Product Officer, C3 IoT.
TechnologyOne is Australia’s largest enterprise software company, with their software powering over 1,000 leading corporations, government departments, and statutory authorities across the globe. “TechnologyOne delivers enterprise software as a service. Our deep innovation brings the cloud closer to our customers, and delivers better outcomes than can be achieved on premises,” says Iain Rouse, Group Director of Cloud, TechnologyOne. “We are very excited that Amazon Aurora is now compatible with PostgreSQL. In our tests, we were able to use it with zero changes to our software or schema, and it is so fast that we’ll be able to operate at a level at least 10x faster than SQL Server Enterprise Edition – and without 50 pages of license agreements. This is transformational for our business and our customers – we are all in with AWS and it remains the best decision.”
