Amazon Aurora DSQL features

There are no servers to provision, patch, or manage, and there is no software to install, maintain, or operate. Aurora DSQL automatically handles updates, such as minor version upgrades, patching, and security updates, removing maintenance downtime and freeing you to focus on innovation.

It's easy to start small and scale to virtually no limit with no manual intervention and no changes to data architecture or application design. Amazon Aurora DSQL continuously scales reads, writes, compute, and storage independently, removing scaling bottlenecks while maintaining performance.

Aurora DSQL is designed for 99.99% single-Region and 99.999% multi-Region availability. Its clusters support application high availability by providing a fully managed, multi-AZ Regional endpoint per cluster. This means that your applications can continue to read and write with strong consistency, even in the rare case your application processing is interrupted in an AWS Region.

Aurora DSQL has built-in fault tolerance with no single point of failure. Aurora DSQL ensures every component within the system is protected against individual machine or data center facility failures. In the event a component approaches overload, it automatically rebalances your workload to maintain system health, creating additional copies as needed without downtime or data loss. Aurora DSQL will automatically self-heal, restoring components without any manual operations required and without compromising availability or consistency.

Aurora DSQL enables the highest level of security with strong workload isolation using Firecracker microVMs. It natively integrates with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for database authentication and authorization. All customer data is private and always encrypted at rest and in transit.

By default, Aurora DSQL encrypts all customer data at rest. Encryption at rest enhances the security of your data by using encryption keys stored in AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).

Aurora DSQL supports gateway virtual private cloud (VPC) endpoints and interface VPC endpoints for connections within a VPC or from on-premises data centers. Private network connectivity can be configured from your on-premises applications to Aurora DSQL through interface VPC endpoints enabled with AWS PrivateLink—simplifying your private connectivity to Aurora DSQL and maintaining compliance.

Aurora DSQL uses AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) to authenticate and authorize access to resources. You can specify IAM policies and identity-based policies, define attribute-based access control (ABAC) using tags in the policies, and specify conditions that allow granular access, restricting read or write access, based on identities. You can associate IAM roles with Postgres database roles, bridging the benefits from IAM with PostgreSQL privileges, to provide a comprehensive authorization and access policy across your data.

With AWS Backup integration, you can use the fully managed AWS Backup service to centralize and automate data protection with Aurora DSQL. You can choose full cluster backups for both cross-Region and cross-accounts and automate scheduled backup windows. To restore, AWS Backup will always create new clusters.

Aurora DSQL offers metrics in Amazon CloudWatch to allow you to track key metrics, such as commit latency, bytes written, and bytes read within the AWS Management Console. With Amazon CloudWatch alarms, you can set alarms for specific metrics over a specified time period and perform actions based on customizable thresholds.

In only a few simple steps in the Aurora DSQL console, you can create a new Aurora DSQL cluster and start building your next app. With the AWS Free Tier, you can get started for free with no upfront commitments.

Aurora DSQL provides an easy-to-use developer experience, supporting a majority of commonly used PostgreSQL queries and many popular features. This means it returns identical query results for all supported features, provides identical behavior for most features, and supports popular PostgreSQL drivers and tools with minor configuration changes.

Aurora DSQL provides a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, making it easy for your generative AI models and database to interact through natural language. This capability helps accelerate development cycles and improve developer productivity by eliminating the need for deep SQL expertise or schema knowledge, reducing context switching, and generating code for review in seconds instead of hours or days.