Public cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services Inc. has landed another blow against its rivals in the cloud database wars, announcing the general availability of Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility.

Basically what this means is that customers who use PostreSQL databases can now choose run them on Aurora, which is a relational database that’s optimized for Amazon’s cloud.

Amazon makes some big claims about the advantages of running PostgreSQL on Aurora, saying it provides “several times better performance with scalability, durability, availability, and security as good as or better than commercial databases,” at about a tenth of the cost of other databases.

With regard to pricing, Amazon said Amazon Aurora with PostgreSQL Compatibility is charged at an hourly rate, with no upfront costs or commitments required. The service, which is compatible with PostgreSQL version 9.6.3 and later, is currently available in four AWS regions — US East in North Virginia, US East in Ohio, US West in Oregon and the EU region in Ireland — with more to follow.

The service can scale to support up to 64 terabytes of storage, AWS’s chief evangelist Jeff Barr added in a blog post. To help encourage customers to try out the service, Amazon allows them to migrate their workloads to Aurora from another database via the AWS Database Migration Service free of charge for the next six months.

“Just like Amazon Aurora with MySQL compatibility, this edition is fully managed and is very easy to set up and to use,” Barr wrote. “On the performance side, you can expect up to 3x the throughput that you’d get if you ran PostgreSQL on your own.”

The addition of PostgreSQL compatibility has been expected for some time. Amazon first said it planned to do so in November last year, before launching an open preview in April.

“When we made Amazon Aurora available in 2015, for the first time, customers had a cost-effective and high performance alternative to commercial databases like Oracle and SQL Server—and this is a big part of why Amazon Aurora is the fastest-growing service in the history of AWS,” said Raju Gulabani, vice president of databases, analytics and machine learning at AWS. “Many of our enterprise customers anxious to move on from their old world database providers have been waiting for Amazon Aurora’s PostgreSQL-compatible edition to launch into general availability.”

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