Benefits of Migrating MySQL Databases to Amazon Aurora

MySQL is an open-source database management system with plenty of power on-premises, but it truly shines when coupled with the power of the cloud.

Since it’s such a popular database, MySQL gives your organization many options for migration. One of those options is Amazon Aurora. As part of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, Aurora provides many benefits for supporting MySQL cloud workloads.

Amazon Aurora Basics

Amazon Aurora is a fully managed database environment for MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. Another AWS solution, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), acts as the foundation, and Aurora builds upon it with a highly optimized environment for these two database technologies.

It offers three MySQL engines, with compatibility for different MySQL releases:

• Aurora MySQL 1.x is compatible with MySQL 5.6.
• Aurora MySQL 2.x is compatible with MySQL 5.7.
• Aurora MySQL 3.x is compatible with MySQL 8.

Amazon Aurora Benefits

Being able to move your on-premises MySQL databases to Amazon Aurora’s powerful solution delivers multiple benefits across performance, database management, availability, scalability, functionality, and cost.

• Commercial database features without the expense: Enterprise-level database features often come with a high price tag, but Aurora offers a cost-efficient way to access this mission-critical functionality. You pay based on your usage and can choose to use a no-contract, pay-as-you-go model, or a reserved instance. Aurora offers many infrastructure configurations to support your MySQL workload requirements.
• Seamless scaling: You gain access to the massive scale of AWS without the need to procure and maintain the infrastructure yourself. Aurora will automatically scale your storage capacity, so changing compute and memory is as easy as a few clicks. This agility allows you to react quickly to changes in workloads.
• Support for your current MySQL tools: Although you’ll find that Aurora has plenty of built-in tools, you don’t have to stop using the MySQL tools you prefer after migration. By continuing to use these utilities, you can reduce the learning curve from moving to the cloud.
• Automated and streamlined database administration: Aurora handles many maintenance tasks, including everything concerning the underlying infrastructure. By leveraging a fully managed database, your database administrators have more time to fully modernize and optimize your MySQL databases for the cloud.
• High availability: Mission-critical workloads need to be reliable, and Aurora offers 99.99 percent availability. The platform includes automated failover, excellent fault tolerance, up to six replicas, cutting-edge security, and other features that maximize uptime.
• Distributed servers across the world: AWS has regions worldwide, with multiple Availability Zones within them. You can get your databases close to your end-users with geographical scaling with cross-region replicas and Aurora global databases, protect workloads against geographic disruptions, and get your resources everywhere they’re required.
• Amazon Aurora Serverless: An on-demand auto-scaling configuration. It scales up or down based on an application’s needs and enables your database to run in the cloud without managing capacity.

MySQL and Amazon Aurora are a powerful team, and you can accelerate your time to value during this migration process when you plan properly. Download our whitepaper “Everything You Need to Know to Plan a Successful MySQL to Amazon Aurora Migration” to learn more about taking MySQL to Aurora.