At its re:Invent developer conference in Las Vegas, Amazon today announced Aurora, a new relational database service the company built from the ground up. As Amazon’s Andy Jassy, the head of the company’s cloud services platform, noted in today’s keynote, the company has been working on this project for over three years now.

As enterprises move to the cloud, they also want to move their databases, but in order to avoid having to pay for expensive licenses, they often choose open source tools like MySQL or Postgres. To get those to perform well, though, is hard. So Aurora is a fully MySQL compatible database service that allows you to migrate data into the service easily.

Unlike standard MySQL, the service is extremely fast, however, and set up to be highly available and self-healing. Amazon says the service can handle about 6 million inserts per minute, for example.

A large instance of Aurora starts at $0.29 per hour, without any upfront cost. That’s 1/10th the cost of the leading commercial database solutions, Amazon argues.

The service is now available in preview.