Aurora DSQL: Scalable, Multi-Region OLTP

The Aurora DSQL paper finally dropped. Reading it yesterday was an interesting experience, because I spent two years (2022-23) working with the AWS team that designed and built Aurora DSQL. Since I have been very familiar with the architecture, the paper's overview description of the system didn't excite me much. And if I am being honest, reading the paper also felt a bit dry, most likely because I am not doing the usual extra thinking to explore/understand the ideas in the paper. But taking a step back today, and leaving my subjective experience aside, I will try to elaborate on how the DSQL architecture is actually built on a set of aggressive and opinionated engineering bets. If I had to explain this architecture in a single sentence (just as I used to do for other teams at AWS) it would be this: We took a traditional monolithic database and blew out every single component into an independent, horizontally scalable service.Exploding the MonolithDSQL divides the database into the…