Six months after releasing it as a public beta, Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week announced the general availability of the PostgreSQL-compatible Amazon Aurora service.
Amazon Aurora, a fast-growing product, was launched in 2014 as AWS’ solution to the traditional relational model. It was described as costly, proprietary, and difficult to license. Although the product was initially launched in 2015 with MySQL support, AWS has been working to add PostgreSQL support to the product since last November.
This support was now production-ready as of Tuesday. AWS currently offers Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility in the Northern Virginia, Ohio and Oregon regions. However, the company promises that it will soon expand this availability to other regions. Here is pricing information.
AWS promises up to 3X performance improvements over traditional PostgreSQL database systems, and at a tenth the price. It supports PostgreSQL 9.6.3 and can scale up to 64TB storage.
Other features include six-way replication, built-in database monitoring via AWS Performance Insights tool, and built-in database monitoring.
AWS stated that the addition of PostgreSQL in Amazon Aurora coincides with a time when developers are increasingly choosing PostgreSQL because it supports JSON, NoSQL, and complex SQL.
“While we’ve been amazed at the growth of Amazon Aurora’s MySQL-compatible edition, many of our enterprise customers anxious to move on from their old world database providers have been waiting for Amazon Aurora’s PostgreSQL-compatible edition to launch into general availability,” said Raju Gulabani, head of databases, analytics and machine learning at AWS, in a prepared statement. “We are excited to help these customers make another step towards database freedom.”
AWS offers a six-month free migration period to organizations that want to move from their existing database environment to Amazon Aurora. In a blog post, Jeff Barr, AWS evangelist, explained that the offer includes AWS’ Database Migration Service and its Schema Conversion Tools (SCT).
“The Schema Conversion Tool will quickly assess your database schemas and code to help you choose between MySQL or PostgreSQL. Barr wrote that our new, limited-time Free DMS program lets you use DMS and SC to migrate to Aurora for free. You have access to multiple types of DMS Instances up to 6 months.”
