Amazon Web Services updated its portfolio of database services today to provide customers with increased reliability, scale, and ease of use. The company’s Aurora database went serverless, while a new Neptune service arrived to help customers run graph databases. Its longstanding DynamoDB NoSQL service also received additional tools for backup and scaling.
This news is the latest salvo from AWS as it works to compete with other cloud providers in the crowded and competitive cloud database market. Other companies like Microsoft, Google, and Oracle are all pushing their own database offerings to try to provide customers with the same promises of high reliability and global scale.
AWS struck back with a wide variety of capabilities that address multiple different use cases. Here’s the rundown.
Amazon Aurora
Aurora Serverless will let customers create database instances that only run when needed and automatically scale up or down based on demand. If a database isn’t needed at all, it will shut down until it is needed. This is designed to give customers the performance that they need, without requiring them to provision infrastructure ahead of time.
Users will be able to pay by the second for the Aurora Serverless computation that they use, meaning that they won’t end up footing the bill for a database sitting idle overnight.
The AWS Aurora Multi-Master feature will let customers distribute writes for their databases across multiple different datacenters. AWS CEO Andy Jassy said that use of Aurora Multi-Master would guarantee customers zero application downtime from failure of database nodes or…
