Last month, I had the privilege of attending the AWS Summit in Chicago. It was a great experience for me because, although I do a lot of work with cloud computing, I have very little experience with the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.

The most interesting session I attended was about a service called "Aurora" (Amazon tends to give all their services catchy names). This is a relational database that looks and acts almost exactly like MySQL but runs much faster. The official product page brags that Aurora is a "MySQL-compatible relational database with 5X performance", however the session I attended claimed that they found cases in which Aurora was 63 times faster than MySQL. The presenters didn't share details of those cases, but even if results are only a fraction of that speed, it's still an impressive performance improvement.

Because Aurora is MySQL-compliant, you should be able to plug it into any application and use it just like MySQL. The SQL syntax is identical and the management tools will be familiar to anyone used to managing MySQL.

Of course, the fact that Aurora is hosted on a cloud platform like AWS gives it the advantage of high availability and flexible scaling that cloud computing offers.

Since most of my cloud computing experience is with Microsoft Azure, I tend to use Azure as a reference point for the services I saw at this summit. I was drawn to Aurora in part because I'm not aware of the same offering in Microsoft Azure.

MySQL as a service is available on Azure, but it's offered and supported by ClearDb - a third party.  If you want better performance or scalability on Azure than that offered by ClearDb, you will need to either switch to a different database or create a Virtual Machine and install MySQL on that, in which case you would be using Infrastructure as a Service, instead of Software as a Service.

In many cases, this is a non-issue. If you are building a new application, you have the flexibility to choose your preferred database technology. MySQL and SQL server have very similar languages; and, although I won't get into a debate here as to which is "better", it would be difficult to argue that SQL server is significantly less reliable or enterprise-ready than MySQL.

But there are times when you don't have a choice of database technologies. For example, if you have a large legacy application that you want to migrate to Azure, it may be a daunting task to migrate every stored procedure and SQL statement to use T-SQL.  Or if you are using a framework that is specifically built on top of MySQL, it makes sense to use that database, rather than re-writing the entire data access layer. Luckily, some frameworks have alternative data access layers. For example, Project Nami is a data access layer for WordPress that uses SQL Server as a data store, rather than MySQL.

Although the various cloud computing companies follow one another and are likely to build a service when they see traction on their competitor's platform, I find it interesting to see these gaps in offerings.