Aurora, from Amazon Web Services (AWS), is a MySQL-compatible service for complex database structures. It offers capabilities and opportunities. But with Aurora, you’re putting a lot of trust in AWS to “just work” in ways not traditional to relational database services (RDS).

David Torgerson, Principal DevOps Engineer at Lucidchart, is a mystery wrapped in an enigma and virtually impossible to Google. He shares Lucidchart’s experience with migrating away from a traditional RDS to Aurora to free up developer time.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

Trade off of making someone else partially responsible for keeping your site up

Lucidchart’s overall database costs decreased 25% after switching to Aurora

Aurora unknowns: What is an I/Op in Aurora? When you write one piece of data, does it count as six I/Ops?

Multi-master Aurora is coming for failover time and disaster recovery purposes

Aurora drawbacks: No dedicated DevOps, increased failover time, and misleading performance speed

Providers offer ways to simplify your business processes, but not ways to get out of using their products due to vendor and platform lock-in

Lucidchart is skeptical about Aurora Serverless; will use or not depending on performance

Links:

Corey's architecture diagram on AWS

Lucidchart

Lucidchart’s Data Migration to Amazon Aurora

Preview of Amazon Aurora Multi-master Sign Up

This is My Architecture

re:Invent

Digital Ocean