Another week, another new service from Amazon Inc. hitting the market. Originally revealed at its re:Invent cloud conference last year, Aurora is a homegrown relational database with automated scaling that promises to provide five times the price-performance ratio of traditional alternatives, particularly the open-source MySQL system.

In practical terms, that means that a single instance can perform as many as 100,000 writes and 500,000 read operations per second against up to 64 terabytes of data. The company hopes to take advantage of that speed, which can be attributed in large part to the speedy flash storage running underneath, in order to reposition Aurora as its new flagship relational store.

To that end, the launch is accompanied by a migration function that enables administrators to move data from MySQL deployments on Amazon’s cloud into the database without having to render the information inaccessible for the application or applications using it. That should make switching production workloads to Aurora a lot more feasible for enterprise customers.

Amazon sees many of its users moving over to take advantage of the automation functionality in the database, which does away with the hassle of manually provisioning storage and processing power involved in running MySQL on its platform. It’s also reliable, with more than 99.99 percent uptime and a replication feature that stores six copies of the data inside across 3 different regions for the odd chance that something does go offline.

Aurora is available in five instance configurations with between 2 and 32 virtual processors and 15.25 to 244 gibibyte of memory. Customers are billed based on how much storage they consume at a rate of a dime per gigabyte per month plus the number of I/O operations that the deployment performance, which are in turn priced at two dimes per million per month.

That pricing makes Aurora a highly competitive alternative to both Microsoft Corp.’s managed implementation of its SQL Server database, which has the advantage of a strong on-premise install base, and Google Inc.’s less established but likewise fast-growing Cloud SQL service. And as Amazon continues on its breakneck engineering roadmap, the appeal is only will only increase for organizations hoping to seize the benefits of on-demand computing.

Photo via tpsdave