AWS has launched Amazon Aurora DSQL at the AWS re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas, and AIM is covering the development from the ground up.
Amazon Aurora DSQL outpaces competitors, including Google Spanner, CockroachDB, YugabyteDB and others, delivering 4x faster reads and writes, 99.999% multi-region availability, and zero infrastructure management.
“Aurora DSQL’s active-active architecture and automated failure recovery ensure that a customer’s application is always available by enabling an application to read and write to any Aurora DSQL endpoint,” read the official press release from Amazon.
Amazon also says that transactions from one Region are now automatically reflected in others with ‘strong consistency’. It also eliminates the need to provision, patch, or manage database instances, and any updates or security patches will occur with no downtime. Amazon DSQ is also compatible with PostgreSQL.
Amazon also mentions that it had to reinvent the way a relational database processed transactions. In order to overcome the challenge of achieving strong multi-Region consistency, Aurora DSQL ‘decouples transaction procession from storage’, mitigating limitations of current approaches, ‘which were constrained by information being passed back and forth multiple times at the speed of light’.
Amazon has also integrated a tool called Amazon Time Sync Service, which adds ‘hardware reference clocks’ on Amazon EC2 cloud instances, to synchronise them with satellite-powered atomic clocks to provide ‘microseconds level accurate time’.
Matt Garman, CEO at AWS revealed when he asked customers what is needed for a perfect database, there are a lot of ‘ands’, and the current competition focuses on just the ‘ors’. It’s either multi-region capability, or high consistency, or low latency. With Aurora, he says Amazon is focusing on whatever it takes to build the perfect serverless, distributed SQL database.
Interestingly, Amazon also mentioned that Razorpay, one of India’s leading payment gateway services is planning to use Aurora DSQL. “Aurora DSQL will help Razorpay achieve multi-Region strong consistency, which is critical for financial use cases that require high degrees of precision, for their applications while operating more efficiently at a global scale,” added Amazon in the announcement.
Other companies planning to implement Aurora DSQL include Electronic Arts, Klarna, QRT, and Autodesk. JP Morgan Chase is also using Aurora DSQL to enable low-latency, strongly consistent data sharing across global operations, driving real-time analytics and cloud-first modernisation.
Apart from the new capability to Aurora, Amazon also added new updates to DynamoDB. It will now support strong multi-region consistency, ensuring users with multi-region applications always access the latest data without having to change any code.
Ganapathy ‘G2’ Krishnamoorthy, VP of Database Services at AWS, said, “Aurora removes the need for customers to make trade-offs by providing the performance of enterprise-grade commercial databases with the flexibility and economics of open source.
“Now, we’re reimagining the relational database again to deliver strong consistency, global availability, and virtually unlimited scalability, without having to choose between low latency or SQL,” he added.
It will be interesting to see how Amazon will compete with the competition given that Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud offer serverless SQL database capabilities.
“The options available today force trade-offs. Some provide low latency and high availability, but not strong consistency or SQL compatibility. Others provide strong consistency and high availability, but can’t avoid very high latency and still don’t offer SQL compatibility,” said Amazon regarding the competition for Aurora’s DSQL.
With this release, AWS celebrates 10 years of Aurora, which has grown to support hundreds of thousands of customers, thanks to innovations like serverless architecture and vector capabilities for AI.
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