AWS: Is Hybris better on Amazon Aurora than on RDS?

[geffchang]

The latest versions of Hybris now support Amazon Aurora.

Is Hybris better (performance, etc) on Aurora, than on RDS (mySQL)? Are there some issues or trade-offs?

I'm aware of the features / differences of RDS and Aurora. I'm more concerned with the actual usage / issues (if any) of Hybris with Amazon Aurora.

[arvind-kumar_avinash]

Please note that certification for Amazon is still pending by AWS.

IMHO, it's not Hybris on Amazon MySQL RDS vs Hybris on Amazon Aurora RDS; rather, it's Amazon MySQL RDS vs Amazon Aurora RDS.

I can think of following criteria to compare both of them:

a. Open-source vs closed-source: Aurora is an AWS proprietary, closed-source relational database engine with storage layer optimized for cloud architecture. All comparisons between open-source vs closed-source are applicable e.g. by choosing Amazon Aurora we are fully dependent on Amazon for bug fixes or upgrades. Another example is that with MySQL RDS we can use specific MySQL release which is not a case with Aurora RDS.

b. Speed: Amazon claims that Aurora is up to five times faster than standard MySQL database but if an application performs a high rate of updates against tables with secondary indexes, Aurora performance may be poor. Since writes/updates against secondary indexes are not applicable in case of Hybris, we can expect performance benefit by using Aurora RDS. However, we should not forget that more than anything, performance depends on schema design.

c. Sizing: Aurora storage automatically grows in 10 GB increments, with no impact on database performance. The maximum supported size of a table is 16TB in MySQL whereas it is 64 TiB (~ 64*1.1 TB). Once again, it doesn't make sense of think of this much big size of a table in case of Hyris. However, autoscaling of capacity can alleviate the need for upfront capacity planning.

d. Cost:

(i) Initial cost: Aurora instances cost approximately 20% more than MySQL RDS. Using Aurora read replicas further adds to the cost.

(ii) Running cost: Amazon claims that Aurora RDS provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost but this saving gets offset if you need high performance in which case the cost may be more than MySQL RDS.

e. Availability: MySQL RDS is not an HA solution by default whereas Aurora RDS is natively HA solution. The replication process is slower in case of MySQL RDS and failover is a manual process and may result in last-minute data loss. On the other hand, Aurora provides automatic replication in milliseconds and failover is automatic with no data loss.

[geffchang]

Hi Arvind - Thanks. I'm aware of the features of Aurora, but I'm looking more of actual experience / usage with Hybris. Is it better? Are there any issues?

[arvind-kumar_avinash]

Got it. A good question!