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Amazon Aurora Continues its Torrid Growth, More than Doubling the Number of Active Customers in the Last Year
[April 04, 2018]

Amazon Aurora Continues its Torrid Growth, More than Doubling the Number of Active Customers in the Last Year


Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com (News - Alert) company (NASDAQ: AMZN), shared that tens of thousands of customers are using Amazon Aurora for their relational databases, a number that has increased by approximately two-and-a-half times in the last year. The Amazon Aurora service, which is MySQL and PostgreSQL compatible, is the fastest growing service in the history of AWS, delivering the performance and availability of high-end commercial databases at one-tenth of the cost. New Amazon Aurora customers include ADP, Autodesk, Choice Hotels, TIBCO, Trend Micro (News - Alert), Cloudability, ZipRecruiter, BMLL Tech, Beachbody, Arizona State University, RecoChoku, FirstFuel, Mitel, and Wappa. They join existing Amazon Aurora customers including Verizon (News - Alert), Capital One, GE, Dow Jones, Netflix, Nielsen, Airbnb, Expedia, NASDAQ, and Pearson.

"Historically, customers have had to choose between performance and price when evaluating database solutions," said Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Database, Analytics, and Machine Learning, at AWS. "Customers no longer have to make that choice because Amazon Aurora offers them the best of both worlds. Also, instead of focusing on auditing, fining, or raising prices on customers, as older guard commercial database providers tend to do, we continue to focus on rapidly iterating and introducing new capabilities for Amazon Aurora such as Aurora Serverless, which extends the concept of serverless computing to the relational database, and Aurora Multi-Master, which scales database write operations across multiple data centers for even higher scale and availability. These and other new features are designed to support the most critical enterprise workloads while simultaneously driving down our customers' database costs."

ADP, Autodesk, Choice Hotels, TIBCO, Trend Micro, Cloudability, ZipRecruiter, BMLL Tech, Beachbody, Arizona State University, RecoChoku, FirstFuel, Mitel (News - Alert), and Wappa are just a few of the customers using Amazon Aurora today for the uptime and durability they need to run their organizations.

Autodesk makes software for people who make things like high-performance cars, towering skyscrapers and great films. "Our Account Control Management (ACM) application is a central component for many Autodesk applications, and usage has grown this year," said Brian Mathews, Platform Engineering Vice President, Autodesk. "ACM requires a high performance database with low-lag replication, automatic scaling, and MySQL compatibility. Amazon Aurora allowed us to increase our database connections and greatly improve our scalability, response times, and CPU utilization. Our customers' experience improved in a short time so we're looking into Aurora for additional applications."

Choice Hotels International, Inc. is one of the world's largest hotel companies, with over 6,800 hotels franchised in more than 40 countries and territories. "At Choice Hotels, we process millions of requests every day for guests looking to stay at our properties," said Brian Kirkland, Chief Technology Officer, Choice Hotels. "Transaction volume has grown over 300 percent in the last three years, and sets new daily records every summer. To accommodate this growth, we undertook a significant challenge and developed the first new global reservation system from a hotel company in over 30 years, and built it on AWS. Leveraging Amazon Aurora and other AWS services allowed us to both exceed our performance requirements and lower our costs."

TIBCO is a global leader in integration, API management, and analytics, offering a low-code application platform that empowers citizen developers to build fully functional and smart applications in minutes. "We are an early adopter of Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and used the AWS Database Migration Service to transition TIBCO Cloud Live Apps to Amazon Aurora seamlessly, while it was in production, without our customers noticing any interruption in our service," said Matt Quinn, Chief Operating Officer at TIBCO. "Amazon Aurora's reliability, security, and fast failover will continue to help us scale Live Apps, giving customers constant access to our service so they can build and run apps quickly and with high availability."

Cloudability is a cloud cost-management platform that empowers enterprises to optimize their cloud financials with full accountability. "Amazon Aurora has become the database of choice for all our MySQL workloads," said Matt Finlayson, Vice President of Engineering, Cloudbility. "Our True Cost Engine delivers cost efficiency to customers, using a new predictive model based on petabytes of customer cost optimization data. To support this kind of analysis, we need a database that is performant, scalable, cost-effective, and easy to maintain and tune. Aurora solves our biggest issues with managing large, production databases with strict SLAs. Now that PostgreSQL is supported, we expect all our PostgreSQL workloads to move to Aurora as well."



ZipRecruiter, the fastest-growing online employment marketplace, has connected over 1 million businesses and 100 million job seekers through AI-driven matching technology. "We migrated our MySQL databases to Amazon Aurora in order to handle our incredibly fast growth," said Craig Ogg, Chief Technology Officer, ZipRecruiter. "Scalability and high availability can be challenging with large MySQL databases. Amazon Aurora allows us to easily scale our reads through near-zero-lag read replicas, even under a very heavy write load. That combined with reliable, out-of-the-box cross-availability zone failover means we favor Aurora for all of our live data serving needs."

BMLL Technologies Ltd is a world leader in applying statistical techniques to niche big-data sets, running a web platform for financial services customers to perform machine learning on limit order book data with applications such as market impact, book simulation, and compliance and surveillance. "Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL is helping us solve performance and scalability challenges to provide deeper and faster data analysis to our customers," said Dr. David Robinson, CTO, BMLL Technologies. "In addition, the built-in security, durability, and high availability capabilities of Aurora PostgreSQL help to simplify and automate most of our DBA requirements, lowering our costs while increasing reliability."


Beachbody is a leading provider of fitness, nutrition, and weight-loss programs that empower millions of customers. "To support the transition from DVD sales to our Beachbody on Demand streaming service, we needed a cloud platform that provides agility, scalability, and high availability," said Grant Leathers, Vice President, Technology Operations, Beachbody. "Amazon Aurora provides the foundation for our digital services, supporting over a million users every month with peaks of over 250,000 users in a single day. Aurora also makes live events possible, as it allows us to scale up quickly for popular live workouts and then scale down, so we keep our costs low while our customers enjoy fast, reliable service."

Arizona State University is ranked by U.S. News & World Report as the #1 university in the U.S. for innovation. "ASU continues its drive to improve flexibility and agility in its IT solutions to meet customer needs," said John Rome, Deputy Chief Information Officer at ASU. "We're using Amazon Aurora to cut reporting and extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) time by a factor of over 10, replacing our Oracle workloads with a high-performance cloud database that delivers fast responses to our users. Our ASU Alexa skill and ASU mobile app will benefit from Amazon Aurora's scalability as students arrive en masse this fall and create peak loads. And, the new Amazon Aurora Serverless capability will help us reduce costs for non-production environments, giving us flexibility to support data warehouse and ETL processes with irregular usage patterns."

RecoChoku, a pioneer in Japanese music distribution services since 2001, delivers a wide range of digital music services to mobile phones for consumers in Japan. "If you work with databases on AWS, there is no reason not to choose Amazon Aurora," said Shuhei Sakai, Systems Architect Group, Business Systems Promotion Department at RecoChoku Co., Ltd. "Amazon Aurora is a fully managed system, enabling the development team to focus their human resources on service development. In addition, services are not suspended during maintenance when using Amazon Aurora, which creates significant advantages for a company like RecoChoku that provides services in collaboration with partners. Amazon Aurora has also enabled a dramatic reduction in fees for database software compared to when multiple nodes were used with Oracle RAC."

FirstFuel is the global leader in business customer engagement for the energy industry, delivering customer intelligence to over 30 energy providers in North America and Europe. "Amazon Aurora has immediately become a key component to meeting FirstFuel's uptime and disaster recovery Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with some of the world's most demanding enterprise clients," said Siddharth Kundalkar, Director of Engineering of FirstFuel. "Key functionality such as restore to point in time, reader nodes, cross-region replication, and automatic node failover have dramatically reduced or eliminated our data loss and downtime risks. Aurora has also reduced the time we spend on database management, leading to real productivity improvements."

Mitel is a global market leader in business communications. "At Mitel, we're reinventing our products using cloud-based, microservice applications to give our customers more specialized and innovative ways to communicate and collaborate," said Tim Olson, Vice President, Cloud Engineering. "We're using Amazon Aurora at the core of our Cloudlink platform and our Officelink product. We're excited about the new Aurora Serverless offering, which allows us to further focus on delivering applications at scale without having to think about infrastructure."

Wappa is the pioneer and market leader in taxi expense management, headquartered in Brazil and available in 22 countries. "To help our customers reduce corporate travel expenses, our platform needs to find rides quickly and accelerate the budgeting, payment, and reporting processes," said Cesar Matias, Chief Technology Officer, Wappa. "Since migrating our Oracle database to Amazon Aurora, our user validation process has become 60 percent faster, reporting time per user has dropped 75 percent, and the payment process is 70 percent faster. We're clearly seeing the results in our user growth numbers and user satisfaction ratings of our application."

About Amazon Web Services (News - Alert)

For over 12 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 125 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 54 Availability Zones (AZs) within 18 geographic regions and one Local Region around the world, spanning the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the world-including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies-to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit https://aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

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