# Aurora DSQL changes can now stream to Kinesis with zero infrastructure and zero performance impact!

Hi, it's Shiichan! Today I've got news from the distributed SQL database Aurora DSQL that makes data integration a whole lot easier.

## What was announced?

According to AWS's What's New, Amazon Aurora DSQL's change data capture (CDC) is now generally available (GA). CDC automatically captures the results of insert, update, and delete operations on your tables as change events and delivers them to Amazon Kinesis Data Streams. You can use it for syncing data across microservices, triggering AWS Lambda functions, or delivering changes to Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon OpenSearch Service via Amazon Data Firehose, covering both event-driven architectures and data integration workflows. There's no infrastructure to manage, and it's designed to have zero impact on your database workload's performance.

## The story so far

This CDC capability actually made its debut back in May as a preview feature (announced under the title "Amazon Aurora DSQL now supports change data capture (Preview)"). The core mechanism, streaming to Kinesis Data Streams, was the same back then, but preview features take a bit of courage to build into production workloads: there's no SLA backing them, and you have to stay alert to the possibility that things might change.

## What changes

Now that CDC has reached GA, it's officially ready for production use. Teams running Aurora DSQL who previously had to build their own change-detection logic or rely on polling can now let CDC handle it and receive real-time changes straight from Kinesis Data Streams. Being able to wire up Lambda-triggered downstream processing or Firehose-based delivery into your analytics stack without building extra infrastructure is a nice win.

## Dive Deep

CDC supports three kinds of operations: insert, update, and delete. Each one's results get captured as a change event and delivered to Kinesis Data Streams.

Typical delivery patterns include:

- Consuming directly from Kinesis Data Streams to sync data across microservices
- Triggering AWS Lambda functions to run downstream processing when changes occur
- Delivering to Amazon S3, Amazon Redshift, or Amazon OpenSearch Service via Amazon Data Firehose to feed your analytics stack

CDC streaming is available in every AWS Region where Aurora DSQL is offered. You can try it for free using the AWS Free Tier, which lowers the barrier if you're curious. For setup details, check the [Aurora DSQL CDC documentation](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aurora-dsql/latest/userguide/cdc-setup.html).

## Wrap-up

- Amazon Aurora DSQL's change data capture (CDC) is now generally available
- It automatically captures insert, update, and delete events and streams them to Kinesis Data Streams with no infrastructure to manage
- It's designed to have zero impact on database workload performance
- You can trigger Lambda functions or deliver to S3, Redshift, and OpenSearch Service via Firehose
- After being in preview since May, it's now ready across every Region where Aurora DSQL is available

This is a great update for backend engineers who want to build microservice data sync or event-driven architectures on top of Aurora DSQL!