AWS Certificate topics cover a lot of advance topics on Aurora RDS. This article attempts to cover all questions which maybe asked about Aurora.

Aurora Replica Auto Scaling

• Automatically increasing the number of read replica database based on increased CPU usage.
• Reader endpoint automatically increased to accommodate new read replica databases.
• Reader endpoint load balances over all read replica databases.

Aurora Custom Endpoints

• You create some read replica database on larger EC2 instances for RDS.
• Create Custom endpoint to allocate resources to larger EC2 instances for RDS.
• Use case some process require more compute power from Read Replica IE Analytics.
• You no longer use the read endpoint but setup different custom endpoints for different types of processing.

Aurora Serverless

• Automated database instantiate and auto scaling based on usage
• Good fro infrequent, intermittent or unpredictable workloads.
• No capacity planning required.
• Pay per second of use and can be more cost-effective.
• Client goes through Proxy Fleet which determines the number of Aurora databases needed for the workload.

Global Aurora

• Aurora Cross Region Read Replica
  • Useful for disaster recovery.
  • Simple to put in place.
• Aurora Global Databases (recommended)
  • 1 Primary Region (read/write)
  • Up to 5 secondary (read-only) regions, replication lag is less than 1 second.
  • Up to 16 Read Replicas per secondary region
  • Helps for decreasing latency to clients.
  • Promoting another region (for disaster recovery) has an RTO of less than 1 minute.
  • Typical cross-region replication takes less than 1 second.

Aurora Machine Learning

• Enables you to add ML-based predictions to your applications via SQL
• Simple, optimized and secure integration between Aurora and AWS ML services
• Supported services
  • Amazon SageMaker (use with any ML model)
  • Amazon Comprehend (for sentiment analysis)
• You don’t have to have ML experience
• Use Cases: fraud detection, ads targeting, sentiment analysis, product recommendations

Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL

• Allows Aurora PostgreSQL to understand commands targeted for MS SQL Server (T-SQL)
• Therefore Microsoft SQL Server based applications can work on Aurora PostgreSQL
• Requires no to little code changes (using the same MS SQL Server client drivers)
• Same applications can be used after a migration of your database (using AWS SCT and DMS)