Amazon Web Services Inc., has just taken a shot at rival Oracle Corp., with the release of a new, cloud-based relational database service that it claims will deliver better performance at a fraction of the cost of on-premises installations.

Called Amazon RDS for Aurora, AWS’ new relational database offers the speed and reliability of traditional databases, whilst remaining cost-effective and simple. Aurora has been designed to deliver a throughput that’s five times faster than standard MySQL running on the same hardware. And because it’s a managed service, tasks such as backup, failure detection, patching, recovery and repair are all handled by Amazon’s team.

In a blog post, AWS proclaims Aurora as a self-tuning and self-scaling database solution that will “eliminate[s] bottlenecks caused by I/O waits and by lock contention between database processes”. It says Aurora has been designed to take advantage of its cloud architecture, as opposed to traditional databases that run in a “constrained and somewhat simplistic hardware environment.”

The implication is that Aurora’s biggest advantages stem from its infrastructure, its fresh design and its integration with existing AWS features like Availability Zones. AWS says it used an “SSD-based virtualized storage layer purpose-built for database workloads,” to build Aurora. Storage is automatically added to an Aurora instance in blocksof 10GB a time as required, up to 64TB in total. Replication is available across three of AWS’ Availability Zones.

Aurora is currently availabile as a limited preview in AWS’ US East (N. Virginia) region, on a pay-as-you-go pricing model. It starts at 29 cents per hour for 15.25GB of memory and two virtual CPUs, though I/O and storage are billed separately at 20 cents per million requests and 10 cents per gigabyte per month.

In other news, ZDNet reports AWS has announced a long list of new services at its annual re:Invent conference, which are either in preview now, or due to be rolled out in 2015:

– CodeDeploy, a high scale deployment tool to roll out code easily.

– CodePipeline, which is used inside Amazon and offers workflow modeling and other tools.

– CodeCommit, a managed code repository in the cloud that’s closely located to staging and test.

– AWS Key Management Service, which allows enterprises to manage encryption keys and better meet compliance requirements from a central repository.

– AWS Config, which is an auditing tool to track dependencies involved with changes.

– AWS Service Catalog, which allows admins to create portfolios of products and configurations to deploy

Finally, AWS chief Andy Jassy made an unusual disclosure in an interview with the Wall Street Journal yesterday, revealing the company has surpassed one million business and government customers. The disclosure comes at a time when AWS is facing increasing competition from rivals like Google Inc., and Microsoft Corp. Jassy didn’t disclose how much revenues AWS is making, but the WSJ says estimates put the figure at around $4 billion a year.

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