Future of Databases: Cloud‑Native Innovations, Amazon Aurora, and Migration Strategies

The talk begins by highlighting the exponential increase in data volume driven by the internet, IoT, and micro‑services, emphasizing that modern enterprises need scalable, high‑availability databases to power their data‑driven applications.

Key challenges of on‑premise database management are outlined, including hardware/software installation, patching, backup, clustering, capacity planning, high licensing costs, and operational complexity.

To address these issues, the speaker introduces cloud‑native databases, focusing on Amazon Aurora as the first industry‑leading cloud‑native relational database, detailing its advantages: commercial‑grade performance, open‑source‑like simplicity, MySQL/PostgreSQL compatibility, pay‑as‑you‑go pricing, and fully managed service.

Aurora’s core features are described: high availability across multiple AZs with six data replicas, up to five‑fold MySQL throughput and three‑fold PostgreSQL throughput, compute‑storage separation for rapid scaling, automatic failover, and cost savings of up to 90% compared to traditional licenses.

The architecture principles—compute and storage separation, log‑as‑data, and strong data durability—are explained, illustrating how Aurora achieves financial‑grade resilience and global deployment.

Migration challenges are tackled with the “cloud‑native database migration toolkit,” featuring Babelfish for Aurora PostgreSQL, which provides native T‑SQL support and SQL Server protocol compatibility, allowing seamless migration from SQL Server to Aurora PostgreSQL.

The migration workflow is presented: extract DDL with SSMS, assess compatibility with Babelfish, adjust mismatches, create objects in Aurora, migrate data via AWS Database Migration Service, and finally switch application endpoints to the new Aurora instance.

Real‑world case studies, such as the 九州通 B2B system, demonstrate performance gains (5× faster), 50% TCO reduction, automatic scaling, low latency reads via Global Database, and rapid failover within seconds.

The session concludes with a Q&A covering Aurora’s open‑source roadmap, storage replication using quorum protocol, and how Aurora achieves multi‑AZ fault tolerance.