Amazon Web Services launches its Aurora database engine out of preview

Amazon Web Services (AWS) today announced that its Aurora database engine, which first launched in November in preview, is now generally available to customers.

Aurora can power the existing Relational Database Service (RDS), and is compatible with MySQL and MariaDB databases.

Aurora increases the performance of the RDS. It ensures 6 million inserts per minute and 30 million selects per minute, Amazon said when Aurora was first announced at the AWS re:Invent conference in November. But Amazon wants to offer this performance at a price that beats demands from relational database vendors. So it built Aurora in-house. AWS customers can also call on MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, and PostgreSQL as database engines when using RDS.

The general availability of Aurora is in keeping with Amazon’s efforts to build software that companies can use as alternatives to the tools commercially available on AWS. Amazon has a wide variety of other home-built offerings, including the DynamoDB NoSQL database, the Redshift data warehouse, and most recently, the API Gateway for management of companies’ application programming interfaces (APIs).

Of course, the underlying cloud infrastructure itself has also been an attraction. Amazon feeds this interest by regularly lowering prices and expanding geographically.

All of these enticements have helped Amazon become a major technology provider. AWS generated nearly $6 billion in revenue in the year ending on June 30. Aurora is just one more piece in the portfolio.

Earth Networks, Pacific Gas and Electric, and WeTransfer have been using Aurora, according to a statement today on the news.