Building realtime experiences with Amazon Aurora

Amazon's Aurora is a managed database service compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL that allows for increased performance compared to traditional databases. It benefits from AWS tools and services, making it easier to build larger projects. WebSockets are protocol ideal for real-time communication between devices and backend services due to their bidirectional low-latency messaging capabilities. Aurora helps by providing a scalable solution for storing data, while WebSockets enable bi-directional communication between clients and servers. The Publish/Subscribe pattern is used to distribute messages to many connections in a scalable way. This architecture can be applied to various real-time applications such as chat apps, social media platforms, games, and collaborative spaces. A demonstration of building a chat app using Aurora and WebSockets involves setting up an AWS EC2 instance, creating an Aurora cluster, and running a Node.js express server on the EC2 instance. The server connects to Ably for real-time communication with clients and to Aurora for data persistence. This setup allows for scalable real-time experiences and can be adapted for other applications requiring real-time interactions.