AWS Aurora Advantages: Leveraging Your MySQL and PostgreSQL Experience

If your organization uses a MySQL or PostgreSQL relational database management system (RDBMS), you’re used to their many benefits. Both are renowned for having high levels of data security, on-demand scalability, uptime, and performance. But when your firm is faced with migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS), what should you do? Conducting an AWS migration can be challenging, and if members of your organization don’t have the proper expertise you may have a sub-optimal, or downright inoperable, migration.

But using Amazon Aurora and getting help from an AWS consulting partner and managed services provider could be the answer you’re looking for. Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database designed specifically for the Cloud. It automates difficult tasks, such as database setup, backups, patching, and hardware provisioning. It also offers you all the benefits of MySQL and PostgreSQL RDBMS, like reliable up-time and high performance, but with greater simplicity and at a lower cost. And by getting consulting and managed services from a seasoned AWS expert, you can avoid migration pitfalls like poor cloud application performance, inability to focus on the right business objectives, or anxiety over data security. While MySQL and PostgreSQL have unique market positions, benefits, and use cases, they require a variety of skills and expertise levels to support. Let’s discuss their benefits, analyze AWS aurora advantages, and examine the caveats and best practices for migrating your RDBMS to Amazon Aurora. Conducting a migration on this scale demands extensive planning and expertise only a seasoned AWS consulting partner and managed services provider can provide—if your firm is to reap maximum cost savings and meet all business objectives.

AWS Aurora Advantages Make the MySQL and PostgreSQL Experience Better

MySQL and PostgreSQL offer a variety of benefits and use cases, all of which can be improved upon by AWS aurora advantages. They both use a relational data model, which arranges data into tables of rows and columns. These programs enable you to access your database, run queries, write data, and perform other database management tasks. Both are powerful RDBMSs when properly implemented and have their own strengths.

MySQL and PostgreSQL Use Cases

MySQL has a variety of features and use cases. Currently, it’s used to run some of the world’s largest applications and websites, including Spotify, Facebook, Netflix, and Twitter. Built for reliability and speed, MySQL specializes in Online Transaction Processing Transactions (OLTPs) and can scale to conduct thousands of queries, every second. It’s a solid choice for social network, e-commerce, government, and business applications or websites.

PostgreSQL is not as commonplace as MySQL, but it has its advantages. Its primary differentiator is that it’s open-source and developed by a large community. Any user can extend PostgreSQL using its catalog-driven operation, as it uses dynamic loading. It’s object-relational and includes some features associated with object databases, like table inheritance. It’s standards-compliant, highly extensible, good at preserving data integrity and allows you to define your own data types. Many companies have used it in building products, including Cisco, Juniper Network, Apple, and Red Hat.

MySQL and PostgreSQL Implementation

MySQL and PostgreSQL offer a variety of possible benefits for your firm, but properly implementing them requires many skills. The necessary skill set involves understanding underlying storage engines, code versioning tools, and features that can further business objectives. It calls for mastery of commonplace procedures, including upgrades, backups, recovery and migration. Furthermore, it requires high levels of competence at advanced topics, such as partitioning and clustering. Most of all, supporting these RDBMSs requires knowledge of how to maximize performance, availability, and security.

Your company may be quite successful using MySQL and PostgreSQL. But what should you do when new business needs arise? One day you may find yourself needing greater business agility, an updated IT asset base, stronger security and disaster recovery abilities, or reduced infrastructure costs. If you find yourself in this position, it may be time to migrate to AWS.

Harness All of AWS Aurora’s Advantages

AWS Aurora is the finest MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the Cloud. AWS Aurora’s advantages are numerous, and it can enhance your current MySQL and PostgreSQL investment.

AWS Aurora offers superior performance at a lower cost and complements many other AWS services. It’s a managed service, meaning that you will no longer need to manage the underlying software and infrastructure yourself. With Aurora, you can lower overhead maintenance requirements because instead of utilizing valuable in-house resources to manage the software infrastructure running your database engine, you can delegate these tasks to a cloud expert who can perform them with greater expertise and efficiency, and for a lower cost. This frees your organization to devote all of its resources toward your primary business objectives. AWS Aurora also offers you unlimited storage scalability, so you don’t have to define exactly how much storage you need. Instead, you can scale up and down in real time as needed when your workload changes. This is one of the great advantages of moving to the Cloud.

AWS also manages replication of your database instances to create high availability and fault tolerance and your database layer. If your main database instance goes down, AWS will automatically fail over to a replicated instance and promote that to your new master instance. This takes overhead maintenance of availability and replication of your database instances off of your plate. Finally, AWS Aurora offers Aurora Replicas, which are replicated instances: servers with an exact readable copy of your database that allow you to gain high availability and eliminate downtime. With so many benefits, why would you want to continue managing MySQL or PostgreSQL in-house?

How to Gain the Most Benefits from Your Amazon Aurora Investment

AWS Aurora can add a lot of value to your business. But how can you optimize the benefits you receive when you invest in it? One of the ways is to use migration best practices and avoid pitfalls. If queries are failing due to longer runtime for the extract query, lower the extract query runtime by optimizing your query in its source database. Some migrations run into phase issues, such as character set mismatch issues. If this happens, try changing the column data type to numeric. After migration, you may need to manage performance, especially if full text searches are slow. If this happens you can try using Generalized Inverted Index (GIN) and Generalized Search Tree (GiST) indexes to speed things up.

Cloud migration is a complex process and many things can go wrong. Sometimes the best way to combat such complexity is to ask an AWS consulting partner to provide guidance. By partnering with an AWS solution provider with years of experience and countless successful migrations under their belt, you gain the benefit of their expertise and access to all the skills you need to optimize your MySQL or PostgreSQL AWS Aurora investments. And that gives you confidence—that you’ll have 24/7 availability and the capacity to run all of your workloads. But perhaps best of all, a proficient AWS consulting partner can optimize RDBMS performance and ensure your migration goes off without a hitch—all for a lower cost than your in-house team alone could provide.

Getting Started

Is your firm migrating its MySQL or PostgreSQL database management systems to Amazon Aurora? Let Mission handle it for you. Request a free hour of certified Amazon Aurora advice from one of our solution experts to learn how our team can perform database replication without downtime, advise on setting up infrastructure specifications, and provide infrastructure as code. Mission’s AWS Cloud Services can perform your Amazon Aurora migration and provide the highest possible degrees of performance, scalability, availability, and cost savings.