Databases & Aurora

Purpose-built databases for every workload.

21 sessions at the summit5 external resources

Overview

AWS believes in purpose-built databases — the right tool for the job. Amazon Aurora (PostgreSQL/MySQL compatible) handles relational workloads at cloud scale, with Aurora DSQL providing active-active multi-region with strong consistency. DynamoDB serves single-digit-millisecond key-value/document workloads. ElastiCache and MemoryDB cover caching and in-memory data. Neptune handles graphs, Timestream handles time-series, and DocumentDB is MongoDB-compatible. All integrate with Bedrock for vector storage and AI workloads.

Key concepts

  1. Relational vs. NoSQL vs. graph vs. time-series — choosing the right model
  2. Aurora storage architecture: 6-way replication, log-structured
  3. DynamoDB: partition keys, GSIs, on-demand vs. provisioned
  4. Vector storage: pgvector in Aurora, vector search in OpenSearch
  5. Zero-ETL between Aurora/DynamoDB and Redshift

Key AWS services

  • Amazon Aurora
  • Amazon Aurora DSQL
  • Amazon DynamoDB
  • Amazon Neptune
  • Amazon DocumentDB
  • Amazon Timestream

Learn more — curated resources

Hand-picked official docs, foundational papers, and the best community guides for going deeper on this topic.

Sessions on this topic

21 sessions from the Summit covered this topic. Each is a self-contained mini-lesson.

  1. ANT301Advanced

    A practitioners guide to data for agentic AI

    In this session, gain the skills needed to deploy end-to-end agentic AI applications using your most valuable data. This session focuses on data management using processes like Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and provides concepts that apply to other methods of customizing agentic AI applications. Discover best practice architectures using AWS database services like Amazon Aurora and OpenSearch Service, along with analytical, data processing and streaming experiences found in SageMaker Unified Studio. Learn data lake, governance, and data quality concepts and how Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Bedrock Knowledge Bases, and other features tie solution components together.

  2. COP301Advanced

    Elevating your Agentic AI Observability

    Gain deep visibility into the performance and reliability of autonomous agents with Amazon CloudWatch. This session showcases how CloudWatch delivers endtoend observability for agentic AI workloadstracking decision quality, token efficiency, and workflow execution at scale. Explore prebuilt dashboards and advanced metrics that help you optimize agent performance, control operational costs, and maintain consistent behavior across complex intelligent systems. Walk away ready to implement productiongrade observability that ensures your AI agents operate reliably, make optimal decisions, and deliver measurable outcomes at scale.

  3. ISV210Intermediate

    Boost performance and reduce costs with Aurora: Canva's story

    From initial idea to executionlearn about Canva's journey migrating MySQL workloads from Amazon RDS to Aurora at scale. Discover how Canva achieved meaningful performance improvements, cost savings, and operational efficiencies through this strategic migration. This lightning talk shares real-world insights on planning and executing large-scale database migrations, key Aurora best practices for optimizing cost and performance, and how the latest monitoring features help maintain efficiency as you scale. Learn how AWS Countdown Premium (CDP) accelerated and de-risked Canva's migration, delivering tangible business value while minimizing operational disruption.

  4. STP210Intermediate

    TeamForm's Generative Dashboards with Strands & Bedrock AgentCore

    Most teams are still piloting AI - TeamForm is shipping it. In this session, we show how we built enterprise and production-ready generative dashboards in weeks on AWS Bedrock and AgentCore, and how an AI-native operating model made that velocity possible. Learn what it actually takes to operationalise AI across product and engineering, not just prototype it.

  5. PRT112-SFoundational

    Empower Data with Oracle AI Database and Native AI Services on AWS

    Organisations today depend on fast, secure access to data to support mission-critical operations and evolving AI workloads. With Oracle AI Database services available on AWS, your team can streamline data integration and deliver high-impact solutions for semantic search, fraud detection, quality control, and much more.

  6. AIM204Intermediate

    Get to know Amazon Quick, your new agentic teammate

    Most of us spend more time hunting for information than using it. Amazon Quick changes that. It reaches across all your company's data — documents, databases, emails, Slack threads, dashboards, Jira tickets — and lets you search it, ask questions, and take action, all from one place. Available across web, mobile, Slack, and Microsoft tools with multi-model intelligence, Quick delivers consumer-grade AI with enterprise-grade security and governance. No vendor lock-in, no siloed copilots. Just one AI teammate that works wherever you do.

  7. DAT402Expert

    Deep dive into database integrations with AWS Zero-ETL

    Learn how AWS zero-ETL integrations eliminate complex data movement pipelines across multiple database engines, enabling data engineers, architects, and DBAs to reduce maintenance overhead while ensuring near real-time data availability for analytics and ML workloads. Examine the underlying architecture for supported zero-ETL integrations between Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, and Amazon RDS sources to Amazon Redshift, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon OpenSearch Service targets. Explore data movement options, tunable settings, and monitoring capabilities for ongoing data replicationall without traditional ETL complexity.

  8. DEV201Intermediate

    How Flybuys Built AI Governance to Accelerate Adoption at Scale

    Scaling AI successfully isnt just about moving fast — its about building the right foundations first. In this session, learn how Flybuys focused early on AI governance, steering documents, and engineering standards to enable smooth, secure AI adoption at scale. Well explore how upfront investment in guardrails, training, and approval processes allowed teams to deploy AI capabilities faster and with confidence. Youll hear how Flybuys is embedding governance and security expectations into engineering workflows using Kiro, including standardised steering patterns, approval pathways, and controlled rollout of AI capabilities such as Powers. Attendees will gain practical insights into how slowing down early can unlock faster, safer AI delivery across the organisation.

  9. ARC402Expert

    DynamoDB: Resilience & lessons from the Oct 2025 service disruption

    In this session, we will walk through the architecture for the Amazon DynamoDB DNS management system that triggered the service disruption on October 20, 2025. We will share the lessons that the DynamoDB team learned from this event and explain how we are using these insights to improve both DynamoDB and AWS. You will walk away with actionable knowledge that you can apply to the systems you build.

  10. DAT201Intermediate

    Scaling Data Analytics: Easygo's Modern Lakehouse Journey on AWS

    Discover how Melbourne-based Easygo, powering Stake and Kick.com, transformed their data analytics infrastructure to process over 600,000 daily transactions and tens of millions of streaming events. Learn about their implementation of a modern lakehouse architecture combining Amazon Aurora Zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift, Amazon Kinesis with AWS Glue streaming, and Apache Iceberg on Amazon S3. Results include 95% faster queries, 80% fewer ingestion incidents, 9 hours weekly maintenance savings, and accelerated global expansion. Explore practical strategies for building scalable, secure data foundations delivering near real-time analytics with robust governance across regulated markets.

  11. DAT303Advanced

    Explore whats new in data and AI governance with SageMaker Catalog

    Join this session to learn about the latest capabilities in Amazon SageMaker Catalog that help organizations govern data and AI more effectively. We will walk through new features that make it easier to discover, govern, and securely share structured and unstructured data, models, business intelligence dashboards, and applications. Youll hear how customers are using these capabilities to improve data discovery and access, streamline compliance, and support AI initiatives.

  12. AIM403Expert

    AI League

    Building intelligent AI Agents with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Dive into the future of Al in this competitive workshop where you'll create intelligent agents using Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. Using our no-code Ul interface and generative AI you will develop agents and agentic tools that tackle real-world technical challenges. Experience hands-on learning through dynamic gameplay with live leaderboards while mastering prompt engineering, safety guardrails, tool creation, and performance optimization. Whether you are an avid Al developer or an architect eager to gain practical experience with production-grade agentic Al, this session will give you a new hands-on experience.

  13. ISV211Intermediate

    Scaling Conversation Intelligence with Agentic AI on AWS

    Businesses capture millions of conversations daily, sales calls, support interactions and compliance discussions, yet most of this intelligence remains locked away. Standard dashboards and predefined reports cannot address every customer's unique questions. Dubber, a world leader in conversation capture and intelligence, built Insight Agent on AWS, enabling users to ask bespoke, natural language questions across conversations and structured data to receive context-aware answers in seconds. Learn how Dubber innovated from static dashboards to surfacing business value moments, and now to agentic AI that compresses time to value, making conversation intelligence accessible, scalable and viable.

  14. DEV203Intermediate

    Decisions Over Diagrams: How Bell Financial Group Architects on AWS

    Architecture diagrams show what you built. They don't explain why. At Bell Financial Group, every major technology choice — from landing zone design to compute platform to database engine — is captured in an Architecture Decision Document that forces honest evaluation of trade-offs. In this talk, the Head of Engineering at Bell Financial Group walks through the real decisions behind their AWS platform: why ECS Fargate beat EKS, when DynamoDB wins over relational databases, why the entire infrastructure is written in TypeScript CDK, and the deliberate constraints they place on Lambda usage. No slides full of boxes and arrows — just the reasoning, the trade-offs, and the lessons learned building a regulated financial services platform on AWS.

  15. MAE205Intermediate

    AI at Speed of News: Unlocking Value from Media with Generative AI

    For media and communications organizations, the ability to rapidly discover, repurpose, and distribute content across platforms directly impacts revenue and audience engagement. This session examines how Generative AI is transforming content operations through intelligent metadata extraction, semantic search, and automated workflow orchestration. Using a case study from a global media organization managing 13 petabytes of content growing at 3,000 hours daily, we'll explore practical implementations using Amazon OpenSearch for multimodal retrieval, Amazon Neptune for knowledge graphs, and agentic AI for content assembly. Learn how organizations are achieving faster time-to-market, improved content monetization, and enhanced audience experiences through AI-powered content discovery and recommendation systems

  16. INO101Foundational

    From Zero to 270 AI Agents: how Lendi built Guardian

    When Lendi Group launched Project Aurora on AWS, they bet big on a single super-agent with 270 tools. It floppedtechnically impressive but commercially useless. The agent couldn't sell. The breakthrough came from treating AI like a workforce: specialist agents with clear roles, sales logic embedded in the funnel, and relentless measurement. Engagement tripled. This talk shares the hard lessons from Lendi's 16-week sprint: why capability isn't outcome, why your best prompt engineer might be a 23-year-old closer, and how to architect agentic systems that actually convert.

  17. ISV104Foundational

    hipages Journey Towards an Agentic Engineering Organisation

    Discover how hipages, ANZ's leading online construction marketplace, redefined their software development lifecycle by embedding Claude Code on Amazon Bedrock into daily engineering workflows. Join this session to get practical insights into maximizing Claude Code on Bedrock, understanding the decision process behind selecting this solution, and learning how hipages is pioneering an AI-first strategy that's transforming operations across their entire business.

  18. DEV310Advanced

    Zero-Downtime Migration from Sydney to Auckland (ap-southeast-6)

    With AWS ap-southeast-6 (Auckland) now open, New Zealand organizations can repatriate workloads from Sydney. This advanced session provides practical migration strategies minimizing downtime and eliminating data loss across every layer of your stack. You'll learn region-to-region migration patterns for: *Storage*: S3 replication, EBS snapshots, EFS cross-region transfers *Databases*: RDS read replicas, DynamoDB global tables, self-managed EC2 database replication *Applications*: Lambda, ECS/EKS workload migration, EC2 AMI copying Walk away with a prioritized migration playbook, realistic RTO/RPO targets, and battle-tested sequencing strategies for large-scale data transfers without extended application outages.

  19. FSI202Intermediate

    Accelerating Payment Innovation: Spec-Driven Development with AWS Kiro

    Australian Payments Plusoperator of Australia's critical payment infrastructure including eftpos, BPAY, and NPP, processing millions of daily transactionstransformed their development practices by adopting Spec-Driven Development using AWS Kiro. AP+ manages the payment rails connecting banks, merchants, and consumers throughout Australia. Through intensive Event-Driven Architecture bootcamps and hands-on training, engineering teams now independently run development workshops every two weeks, accelerating delivery of payment platform innovations while maintaining the highest security and compliance standards required for national financial infrastructure. Learn the practical framework for building development velocity in regulated environments.

  20. SEC501All levels

    Where Big Ideas Live: How to Actually Read Research Papers

    Research papers hold ideas you won't find in any docs, blog posts, or explainer videos. They're also brutal to read, and can leave you frustrated. This talk is about how to actually read one, layer by layer. First what the paper is about, then why it's important, and finally how it works. We'll start with AWS IAM Access Analyzer and it's paper on Stratified Predicate Abstraction. Then we'll work backwards through the research papers it's built on, learning about SMT solvers and Decision Procedures. You'll walk out with a method you can use on any paper, in any field.

  21. WPS202Intermediate

    Secure and Resilient Agentic AI for High-Assurance Environments

    As governments worldwide race to modernise services, agentic AI based autonomous systems that plan, decide, and act across workflowsis emerging as a game-changer. This session delivers a compliance-first blueprint for designing, deploying, and governing agentic AI in the Australian public sector, fully aligned with Australias Information Security Manual (ISM) and national AI standards. Learn how to transform legacy processes into proactive, citizen-centric services while ensuring security, transparency, and trustwithout regulatory risk.

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Non-obvious insights

From the Playbook

One sharp, contrarian insight per session — the things teams don't think of unprompted.

RAG retrieval quality is dominated by chunking strategy, not embedding model. Boring but true. Spend a week on chunk size, overlap, and semantic boundaries before you spend a dollar on a fancier embedder. ---ANT301 — A practitioners guide to data for agentic AI
The metric most agentic systems should track and don't is *loop count* — how many tool calls per completed task. It's the canary for prompt regression, model drift, and broken tools. When loop count starts trending up week-over-week, something is wrong even if all your other metrics look fine. ---COP301 — Elevating your Agentic AI Observability
The most underrated Aurora feature isn't performance — it's *storage decoupling for clones*. You can spin up a full prod-fidelity clone in minutes for testing, with no storage cost duplication. Use clones for staging, load testing, and pre-prod validation. Most teams underuse this. ---ISV210 — Boost performance and reduce costs with Aurora: Canv…
Generative dashboards work because you can drop the BI team's backlog. The hidden cost: someone needs to govern the *data model* the agent queries. That used to be the BI team's job. If you displace BI without replacing the governance, you get fast-but-wrong dashboards. Reassign the data modelling responsibility before you ship. ---STP210 — TeamForm's Generative Dashboards with Strands & Bedr…
Putting vectors next to transactional data unlocks real-time RAG over fresh data. Your warehouse can't do that — there's always replication lag. If your AI use case requires acting on fresh transactional data (fraud detection, real-time personalisation), the consolidated DB option becomes more compelling than its raw benchmarks suggest. ---PRT112-S — Empower Data with Oracle AI Database and Native AI S…
Cross-corpus search exposes years of *permission-leak debt* you never knew existed. People had access to channels they should have been removed from; service accounts have read access to everything; old projects retain over-broad permissions. The agent will surface all of it. Plan for cleanup as a *deliberate* phase of rollout — pretending it's not there means it'll show up as a security incident. ---AIM204 — Get to know Amazon Quick, your new agentic teammate