Aurora DSQL goes live with multi-region support

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released Amazon Aurora DSQL for general availability. This serverless, distributed SQL database is designed to support high-availability applications with multi-region strong consistency and PostgreSQL compatibility. AWS says that it delivers read and write performance up to four times faster than other widely used distributed SQL databases.

Aurora DSQL is available in eight AWS regions: US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Paris, London, and Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo and Osaka), with additional Regions expected to be added in the future.

AWS says customers developing globally distributed applications have traditionally faced trade-offs when selecting a database – typically choosing between low latency without strong consistency or strong consistency with high latency. These constraints have made it challenging to achieve both high performance and reliability in a highly available SQL database.

According to AWS, Amazon Aurora DSQL addresses this challenge by delivering both low latency and strong consistency, allowing customers to build highly available applications at scale. The service aims to reduce operational overhead by removing the need for patching, upgrades, and maintenance downtime.

“Modern applications require databases that can deliver both world-class performance and strong consistency without compromise,” says Ganapathy (G2) Krishnamoorthy, VP of database services at AWS. “With Amazon Aurora DSQL, we’ve fundamentally reimagined distributed database architecture to enable customers to build applications with virtually unlimited scalability and zero operational overhead, while maintaining the strict consistency their businesses demand.”

Amazon Aurora is a cloud-native relational database designed to combine the performance and availability of commercial databases with the flexibility and cost-effectiveness of open-source solutions. According to AWS, hundreds of thousands of customers currently use Aurora to support their relational database needs.

While Aurora includes a broad set of features for handling data workloads and applications, AWS says that globally distributed, real-time applications can expose challenges in scalability, consistency, and performance across multiple geographic regions.

To address these challenges, AWS created Aurora DSQL, which it says eliminates the traditional trade-offs between latency, consistency, and SQL functionality. Aurora DSQL includes automated failure recovery, multi-region strong consistency, and the ability to read from and write to any Aurora DSQL endpoint.

AWS says that transactions written in one region are consistently reflected across all regions, and that infrastructure management tasks – such as provisioning, patching, and database instance management – are handled automatically, with updates occurring without downtime or performance degradation.

Aurora DSQL is designed to scale read and write operations independently, without the need for sharding or manual instance upgrades. Transaction processing is separated from storage, which AWS claims helps eliminate common performance bottlenecks. The service includes a Model Context Protocol server, enabling integration with generative AI models and AI agents for tasks such as performance analysis, feature development, and test environment creation.

Aurora DSQL is compatible with PostgreSQL and built with a serverless architecture that, according to AWS, offers virtually unlimited scalability. It is positioned as suitable for a range of workloads, including high-throughput financial systems, real-time gaming leaderboards, social media platforms, and e-commerce applications.

Jimmy Adams, ADP chief product development officer, says: “At ADP, we manage a vast amount of data across multiple regions to provide seamless access to payroll, human resources, and tax services for more than a million clients in over 140 countries and territories.

“With that size, scale, and our commitment to resiliency, Aurora DSQL further enhances our offerings. Aurora DSQL’s single-digit millisecond response times, automatic scaling, and active-active multi-region architecture can help us efficiently handle surges in data volumes with ADP’s large client base while maintaining transactional consistency across regions.”

Hiroyuki Nishizaki, DeNA infrastructure engineer, says: “Our global operations necessitate the management of a large number of environments that demand scalability beyond the limits of a traditional relational database.

“With Aurora DSQL, we can access a globally synchronised, low-latency relational database with virtually unlimited scalability through a single endpoint. This can help us greatly simplify our infrastructure management by replacing hundreds of database shards with Aurora DSQL. Aurora DSQL represents a significant advancement in simplifying horizontal scaling for relational workloads while maintaining strong consistency and multi-region capabilities.”

Haotian Xu, Robinhood storage engineer, says: “By providing virtually unlimited scalability from a single endpoint and eliminating the need for manual provisioning, patching, and management of database instances, Aurora DSQL is a huge opportunity to streamline our database operations. The efficiency gains and operational simplicity offered by Aurora DSQL are substantial, and we are excited to expand its use across our organisation.”

Aurora DSQL is available through the Aurora DSQL Console, where users can begin using the service without upfront commitments. Pricing is based on the number of distributed processing units (DPUs) and the amount of storage consumed. Under the AWS Free Tier, the first 100,000 DPUs and 1 GB of storage per month are available at no cost.

* Visit the Amazon Aurora website here.