Database performance monitoring specialist ScaleArc Inc. is integrating its software with Amazon Web Services’ Aurora database service in order to help customers boost the performance and availability of their most critical applications.

ScaleArc sells database load balancing software that sits between database servers and the application, directing traffic into the database on behalf of the app. The software now integrates with AWS Aurora, the popular MySQL-compatible relational database engine that AWS released last year. With the new integration, Aurora customers can get failover ability, which brings on standby service in the event of a system failure, and faster application performance, the company said.

ScaleArc said these benefits are increasingly important to enterprise customers, because application downtime can cost companies millions of dollars in lost revenue, and information technology and operations teams are facing new pressures tied to a change in user expectations.

“Customers are drawn to the Amazon Aurora offering because of the focus on improving speed and availability of database services in a cloud environment,” Justin Barney, president and chief executive of ScaleArc, said in a statement. “By supporting the ScaleArc software on its PaaS [Platform as a Service] offering, AWS has increased the application uptime and performance capabilities of its database platform.”

When integrated with AWS Aurora, ScaleArc can automatically detect Aurora clusters, helping users to avoid manually configuring cluster details and simplify deployment. In addition, ScaleArc can detect role changes in Aurora clusters, detect failovers in progress and automatically hold transactions in a queue, thereby protecting applications from showing errors. The software also supports what ScaleArc calls “geo-aware and replication-aware load balancing,” which allows it to optimize application performance by directing traffic to the best-performing server.

Cyber intelligence platform Sixgill, which specializes in monitoring the Dark Web, or parts of the Web that require special software to access, for evidence of cyber attacks, said ScaleArc’s integration with Aurora has significantly improved the availability of its sensor-based location services application. “Since we also can’t control maintenance windows in the cloud, the ability of the ScaleArc software to eliminate downtime during maintenance further increases our application uptime, and ScaleArc’s caching improves performance with no code changes,” said Sixgill Chief Technology Officer John Dohm.