Understanding Aurora clusters and replicas
Amazon Aurora has been designed to benefit from cloud technology and as a result, it can use cloud ideologies such as auto-scaling (both horizontal and vertical) and decoupling of different parts of the application to improve resilience in a deeper manner than RDS. Let's take a closer look at an Aurora cluster to see how it decouples the compute layer and the storage layer to offer high redundancy and fast scaling.
Aurora clusters
An Aurora cluster is made up of two different types of nodes:
- Database instance: This is the power of the database and is where the database application sits and the processing of the data happens.
- Cluster volume: This is the storage layer spanning three AZs to offer the six data storage locations.
The following diagram shows how an Aurora cluster is arranged:
Figure 5.1 – Amazon Aurora cluster topology
All of the data is stored within the cluster volumes...
