Pros and Cons of Amazon Aurora
Amazon brand is renowned for providing top-notch digital services to customers all around the world. Its Amazon Web Services (AWS) is an incredibly popular and essential service today. AWS offers world-class cloud computing and virtual storage services to enterprises and individuals.
The Amazon Aurora was launched to combat the limited performance, availability and scalability offered by conventional database systems.
In this article, we have detailed the essential information that a user of AWS Aurora needs to know, including the advantages of using Amazon Aurora as well as the pros and cons of Amazon Aurora in 2021.
What are the advantages of using Amazon Aurora?
Apart from being completely compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora also offers numerous other advantages, such as:
What are the advantages of using Amazon Aurora
Scalability
Amazon Aurora features an auto-scaling feature that needs to be enabled by the user. This comes in handy when your storage requirements grow with time. The system automatically expands or shrinks the size of the database according to storage space requirements without the need for the user to intervene.
Scalability is extremely advantageous when you cannot predict application volume on your database in a given month.
Affordability
Despite being incredibly powerful and efficient, Amazon Aurora’s services are extremely cost-effective. Amazon Web Services charges users for only the extent of resources used, such as database space consumed and the level of processing power used.
As there are no upfront payments required and no hidden fees charged, it makes Amazon Aurora is an incredibly affordable cloud computing and storage service.
Security
Amazon VPC allows users to isolate their network when the database is running. Additionally, the AWS Key Management service helps create encryption keys for additional data protection on the Amazon database.
Availability
AWS Aurora allows users to replicate their Aurora in multiple Availability Zones. This is a worldwide database that can be easily shared among different AWS regions that can noticeably decrease the local write/read speed.
Migration
Users can easily migrate their local database into Aurora using MySQL dump and pg-dump commands.
Managed
Shifting to AWS Aurora is incredibly easy from your current database. All you have to do is start an instance with the AWS RDS console or call an API on your code. Additionally, Aurora also provides constant monitoring using Amazon Cloudwatch at no extra cost.
With AWS Aurora, users need to worry about upgrading, updating and provisioning database space. Amazon controls everything and can even perform software patching when needed.
What are the pros and cons of using Amazon Aurora?
Amazon Aurora offers a larger array of pros and benefits as compared to its downsides. Numerous renowned brands, such as Netflix, BBC, etc. rely on AWS for providing their OTP services to consumers around the world. Apart from this, Amazon Aurora has become increasingly popular among small and medium-sized enterprises as the go-to for affordable, efficient and advanced cloud storage and computing services.
Let’s take a quick look at the distinct pros and cons of using Amazon Aurora in 2021:
PROS of Amazon Aurora
1 – Fault tolerance
AWS Aurora is incredibly fault tolerant and can manage minor errors without the need for human intervention. It has specific quality parameters integrated into it which take care of all management tasks, leaving you to focus on the core aspects of your business.
2 – Backup / Restore
AWS Aurora performs regular backups to ensure the safety of stored data. Using this incredible feature, you can now easily restore any lost data or code without having to re-write the entire code.
3 – Open source compatibility
Amazon Aurora is completely compatible with the two most popular open-source databases – MySQL and PostgreSQL. Thus, new users do not need to go through an extensive training session to learn how to work with Aurora.
4 – Autoscale
Easy scalability is yet another benefit of using Amazon Aurora. It is designed to auto-scale to a larger or smaller size, according to growing or decreasing cloud resource requirements respectively. Aurora can perform horizontal and vertical auto-scaling with equal ease.
5 – Speed
According to most users, Amazon Aurora remains the fastest cloud computing and storage service when it comes to cost-to-speed ratio. It is over 5 times faster than MySQL and around 3 times faster than PostgreSQL.
CONS of Amazon Aurora
Now let’s take a quick look at some of the drawbacks or cons of using Amazon Aurora in 2021:
1 – High load apps are costly
Many users believe that Aurora Serverless is more feasible and less expensive in comparison to a single provisioned Aurora instance.
2 – Limited resources for small instances
Amazon Aurora is not considered the best choice for testing or developing small and medium instances as the number of resources and connections are restricted.
3 – Additional data transfer costs
Users have also reported being charged for using best practices which have incurred data transfer charges on their monthly bills.
Conclusion
Amazon Aurora is an incredibly powerful, affordable and efficient option for running small and medium instances on cloud servers. Aurora is extremely cost-effective, easy to use and offers a vast choice of additional features that are designed to make app testing and development easier and most efficient.
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