Amazon Aurora DSQL

Seems like a competitor to Azure's CosmosDB offering , which also now has wire support for postgres.

* RDS is a managed relational database service. You got a database? We'll run it in the cloud for you. Exact same bits and bytes as you're running locally.

* Aurora is Amazon's own relational database. You can't run it yourself, only with Amazon. It can pretend to be either Postgres or MySQL. And it'll be cheaper and faster and have higher availability. But it won't be the exact same bits and bytes as your own Postgres, so there's some risks.

So far the stuff we said runs on clusters. You pick how big and how powerful and how many and in which AZ and configure how to scale it.

This has fairly pragmatic limits before at a certain point sharding and continuous horizontal scaling just gets too hard.

* Until Aurora Limitless that is which is, well probably not limitless (I don't know) but effectively.

* But you're still configuring cluster sizes and scaling policies. If you don't want to do that, Aurora has a Serverless option. It's the same Aurora but now you don't have to worry about scaling it yourself. The first version was Aurora Serverless but people said it wasn't very good.

* So they put out a 2nd one which is great and scales to zero.

* Now if you have globally distributed customers or care a lot about resiliency, you probably want your database in multiple regions. And you're going to be setting up eventual consistent updates for that. To make that easier there is Aurora Global Database, which is the same Aurora, but now with cross region replication.

* But it's not strongly consistent across regions. Aurora DSQL is. It's an even more bespoke version of Postgres. Actually it's not a relational database one at all, it just pretends to be one. But it uses atomic clocks and shit to cheat the cap theorem and give you global distribution and resiliency with strong consistency.

So in conclusion there's basically only 3 things here:

* RDS which is an unopinionated way of running a relational database in the Cloud

* Aurora, Amazon's highly opinionated relational database. That has Global, Serverless, and Limitless configuration options.

* And Aurora DSQL which is not Aurora a relational database at all but plays one on TV. But it gets to have the best of all worlds - SQL and NoSQL.

They probably should have called it something new but Aurora has good brand recognition. People know and trust Aurora.

In the long term all will probably continue to exist depending on where you are in your cloud journey. But I also expect that in the fullness of time if you're building a new Cloud native application and you don't have to worry about legacy migrations, you'll probably choose either DynamoDB or Aurora DSQL in 99.9% of cases.

Very interesting announcement!

We are also building a hosted Postgres service based on Firecracker and with the ability to create unlimited databases. Will have to dig in and see how we compare to this. https://www.prisma.io/blog/announcing-prisma-postgres-early-...

This but unironically - if I’m in the market for a geo distributed hyper scale DB, I genuinely and sincerely have no interest in foreign key constraints. They are pretty much useless, if not actively harmful, at scale.

AWS is confusing because they have a lot of tools that differ in dimensions that 80% of the users don't understand.

If you don't understand, for example, the difference between MySQL and PostgresQL then RDS/PostgresQL and RDS/mysql are the same. How does aurora mysql and aurora PostgresQL differ from standard RDS versions? Well, you have to actually read and understand...or watch some yoyo's YouTube video explainer.

AWS is complicated because it offers a lot. Do you want a satellite downlink? AWS has that. How about a private 5G cell network? Yep. How about a distributed data store with basically fixed read latency? Well, there are a bunch of different options depending on what you want.

Because you're obviously not used to being in the enterprise space, you think that confusion is what they want. They don't. In the space where people spend the big bucks being totally clear is what every good vendor strives for. You're in a multi-year relationship with these companies, and you want them to succeed. AWS isn't Oracle.

Obviously there are tons of shops that will sell people the wrong thing. But then another shop comes along and takes their business (which is one project I'm involved with now - they have like some ridiculous RDS bill that shouldn't be more than $500/mo).