Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced several new capabilities for Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB, designed to support the most demanding workloads that need to be operated across multiple regions.

The new capabilities, debuted at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, are focused on supporting multi-region workloads by delivering strong consistency, low latency and the highest availability, whether customers use SQL or NoSQL.

Up first is the launch of Amazon Aurora DSQL, a new serverless, distributed SQL database that allows customers to build applications with the highest availability, strong consistency and PostgreSQL compatibility,

Amazon Aurora DSQL offers a cloud-native, serverless, distributed SQL database that delivers the performance and capabilities of a high-end commercial database with the cost-effectiveness of open-source solutions. The service has been designed from the get-go to meet the demands of globally distributed, real-time applications, including offering 99.999% multi-region availability, strong consistency and virtually unlimited scalability. Aurora DSQL eliminates the tradeoffs faced by developers to provide low latency, SQL compatibility and zero operational burden.

The service is said by AWS to be the fastest distributed SQL database, delivering reads and writes up to four times faster than other popular distributed SQL databases. Aurora DSQL does so through an “active-active architecture” that allows applications to read and write from any endpoint to ensure high availability and resilience.

To support growing workloads, the service also scales automatically to meet any workload demand without requiring database sharding or instance upgrades, maintaining consistent performance even as usage grows.

Aurora DSQL additionally assists database processing by addressing two critical challenges — achieving multi-region strong consistency with low latency and synchronizing servers with microsecond accuracy. Aurora DSQL decouples transaction processing from storage to allow parallelized writes across regions for fast, consistent performance and leverages Amazon Time Sync Service to synchronize operations globally with microsecond-level accuracy.

In an example provided by AWS, Razorpay Software Pte. Ltd., one of India’s largest fintech companies, plans to use Aurora DSQL to power scalable, resilient applications for its rapidly growing user base. Aurora DSQL’s multi-region strong consistency is critical for financial use cases requiring high precision, enabling Razorpay to operate efficiently on a global scale.

“Aurora removes the need for customers to make trade-offs by providing the performance of enterprise-grade commercial databases with the flexibility and economics of open source,” Ganpathy Krishnamoorthy, vice president of database services at AWS, said in a statement. “Now, we’re reimagining the relational database again to deliver strong consistency, global availability and virtually unlimited scalability, without having to choose between low latency or SQL.”

Announced alongside Amazon Aurora DSQL, Amazon DynamoDB has received an upgrade with the introduction of strong consistency for global tables. The addition leverages the same technology as Aurora DSQL to allow applications to achieve consistent, low-latency performance across multiple regions while maintaining DynamoDB’s scalability and zero infrastructure management.

With the update to DynamoDB, multi-region applications can reliably access the most current data without requiring any code changes. Through a combination of strong consistency with its serverless architecture and single-digit millisecond latency, DynamoDB offers a strong solution for globally distributed, high-performance workloads.

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