ScaleArc’s Database Load Balancing Software Now Compatible with Amazon Aurora

ScaleArc’s database load balancing software deploys between application and Amazon Aurora database servers to direct traffic into the database on behalf of the application. ScaleArc has now engineered its software to work with Amazon Aurora, a MySQL-compatible relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. The ScaleArc software leverages Amazon Aurora’s application programming interfaces (APIs) to apply ScaleArc’s functionality to Amazon Aurora’s environment.

Now Amazon Aurora customers can leverage ScaleArc software to:

• Automatically discover an Amazon Aurora cluster and avoid manually configuring cluster details within the ScaleArc software, simplifying deployment;
• Detect role changes on an Amazon Aurora cluster, allowing ScaleArc software to automatically write to the primary or master files and read secondaries or slaves files when Amazon Aurora changes the role of servers in a cluster;
• Enable app-transparent database failover, so that ScaleArc software will detect a failover in progress, hold transactions in its queue, and drain the queue when Amazon Aurora completes the failover, shielding the application and the customer from seeing application errors;
• Support geo-aware and replication-aware load balancing, enabling ScaleArc software to optimize performance by sending traffic to the best-performing server, based on time to first byte;
• Co-locate resources to ensure high application performance, allowing ScaleArc software to communicate with an Amazon Aurora cluster to ensure the ScaleArc software deploys in the same region as the cluster to avoid wide area network (WAN) latency from slowing application throughput; and
• Monitor database server health and replication lag, so that ScaleArc software can call from internal AWS tables to understand whether any database servers are behind in their replication performance to avoid serving stale data.

“As a customer of both AWS and ScaleArc, we appreciate the ability to leverage the ScaleArc features on AWS,” said John Dohm, CTO of Sixgill. “The simplicity of initiating services on Amazon RDS together with ScaleArc’s application uptime and performance enhancements improves the availability of our sensor-based location services application. Since we can’t control maintenance windows in the cloud, the ability of the ScaleArc software to eliminate downtime during maintenance further increases our application uptime, and ScaleArc’s caching improves performance with no code changes.”

Sixgill conducted benchmark testing on the performance of ScaleArc software on Amazon Aurora, and the test results demonstrated that ScaleArc:

• Enables automatic read/write split
• Load balances read traffic to boost overall capacity
• Increases query per second processing by more than 400%
• Adds no latency to application performance

“Customers are drawn to Amazon Aurora because of its focus on improving speed and availability of database services in a cloud environment,” said Justin Barney, president and CEO of ScaleArc. “With ScaleArc software, AWS customers can now increase their application uptime and performance capabilities of its database platform.”