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Amazon Aurora is a MySQL compatible relational database system from Amazon Web Services.Old Database New Again: AWS Aurora, and it ShinesAmazon Aurora has been chosen as a drop-in replacement for another popular, but a less affordable relational data storage engine. At time of this writing the system is getting ready to be commissioned in for production use on a select application basis. Given the adoption is, and it appears to be very positive, Amazon Aurora will be the sole choice for any other future implementations and serve as a replacement to other transactional databases. My personal view of what business problems Aurora solves or addresses well:Aurora stands out in clustering (or multi-zone high availability) provided out of the boxDBA-less (almost) solution, at least the server-side aspect is muted, no patching or any hardening to make Scale horizontally or vertically, or both.The serverless option is attractive for ad-hoc useRead-only replicas for robust analytics Easy of programmability, supported by most drivers immediately,Easy scaling - can be either horizontal and/or vertical. Nearly seamless backups, easy management. 0 worries about server-side security. Secondaries: up to 15 read-only replicas are enough even for very analytics hungry enterprises plus it makes all the data immutable. Speed: it is hard to say 100% accurately, but in my view, Aurora beats all in the cost to speed ratio.,The Small and Medium instances are only good for testing or development, the number of connections and resources is limited. The 5.7 as the latest version of AWS Aurora in MySQL compatibility is behind feature-wise to what the most recent release of MySQL offers (the same applies to Postgres mode). Some odd or sub-optimal configuration values with some parameters not changeable. No online development experience. So one must rely on Open Source tooling that is typically subpar to commercial offerings which in turn often are pricey and requires a desktop environment. I wish AWS Cloud 9 could offer in the Cloud Aurora development.,10,More predictable costs (AWS provides more than one budgeting and ToC tool unlike the other Cloud providers by the way). Aurora can be more expensive (roughly 20%) than a dedicated standalone MySQL or Postgres, however, it is much faster and far more elastic than the regular, hosted instance. The development time went down. This is especially true with Microservices or application mesh. The DBA becomes less in focus, backup, patching, and failover are no longer a task or item to worry about too much, this allows us to assign the resources differently. Less advanced planning. MySQL or Postgres Aurora are both well understood and mature products with plenty of pool of talent.,,8,Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, PostgreSQLHigh-Speed, Low-Cost and logins for years. Amazon Aurora filled a huge need!Our organization has a need to store massive amounts of logs in AWS S3 storage. We use Amazon Aurora to query against that data and avoid using high priced third-party logging indexing software and their hot storage. AWS Athena use is isolated to our development teams and business analysts only. The main purpose for our organization using Amazon Aurora is simply cost savings and further centralizing under the AWS platform.,Amazon Aurora's billing style is ideal. You only pay for what and when you use it. If you store large amounts of data but do not need to query against it, there is no cost until you do. Amazon Aurora is highly supported and has seemed to be supported by a knowledgeable staff. While the use rolled into our premium support agreement, we found their staff and training resources to be well above average. The speed is industry leading relational database. That simple. Faster, more secure and reliable.,While the service is outstanding there does seem to be a routine issue in connecting or keeping connections to Amazon RDS DB Instances at times or the connection is slow. I think clearer documentation would be highly beneficial here. Increased logs or discovery notes in the event of a replication failure.,9,Amazon Aurora has significantly reduced our third-party logging software costs. Amazon Aurora has significantly increased our ability to store logs long term with the peace of mind of being able to access and query the database with ease.,Datadog,AWS Lambda, AWS CodePipelineAmazon Aurora is the database to lookout for in the futureAmazon Aurora is essentially a relational database as a service on AWS. Since it is cloud-based, there are many advantages to its name. First of all, it is a server-less database which essentially means that you do not need to host a physical server and provide space for it. Secondly, it is a pay-per-use model which means you only pay whenever you use it, which is a great feature if you do not make everyday queries into the database. Since it is again an amazing product from Amazon, it fits very well in the AWS ecosystem. You can use it to scale your database as per your needs, no need to buy server space and resources in advance, then not use them. It can scale and descale according to your needs.,It is a high performance and low latency database. You can also be assured of the high-availability of the database and the services hosted. The Security provided by Amazon is again top notch because all of the data is encrypted and secured. The customers feel much more relaxed and assured when the project is using Amazon Aurora to host their services. A big plus point for Amazon Aurora is the latest and impactful upgrades which it brings in the package. The automated up-gradation and maintenance is an outstanding feature which it provides to receive and stay up to date with the latest upgrades in the DB world. It is compatible with MYSQL and PostgreSQL. It essentially means that the database is able to support the old data-sets and tools which were being used on those DB's. This is a great advantage because it is essentially backward compatible. The Amazon technical team behind the development of this software is very knowledgeable and supportive as well. We told our requirements clearly and they suggested the best use of the database for us, which scenario it should be used, and which it is not a perfect fit.,I think the biggest point for a project or team to consider is the cost. Although it can scale and descale according to your requirements, still you need to be cautious and have a vision of how big your database is going to be, how complex it is going to be, and how much does latency matter. You need to factor all those decisions before going to spend extra on Amazon Aurora as compared to a simple MYSQL database. It suffers from Clod start which is a very well known aspect of the product. But the recovery part is also not up to the mark. They need to improve on the ability to restore a copy of the backup, but mostly it is seen that the copy is corrupted or not the latest one. It does allow us to add new nodes to the existing cluster but we need to be wary of that the new nodes are read-only nodes. All the functions of write/update will still be carried out by the master node only.,10,After migrating to Amazon Aurora, our speed of the query, database availability, and security has increased a lot from before. It has an inbuilt autodetection and correction mechanism for locks in the database, which is a great asset for any team. It also enhances our database schema if it not properly structured. If your requirements are not clear at the moment, but you know based on the project that it is going to be a big database, then you should go with Amazon Aurora as you can scale and descale based on your needs.,PostgreSQL and MySQL,PostgreSQL, Teradata Database, SQLite, Amazon DynamoDBVery happy with Aurora, especially operationally.We use it as our primary data store for customer data. It allows us to handle our large traffic load during peak hours. We use a variable number of reader nodes depending on traffic.,Adding and removing reader nodes is seamless Failover is fast Low replication delay on reader nodes,Some quirks exist with corner case behaviors. e.g. we had some perf issues with GIN indexes. A little slow to provide the latest Postgres versions. We'd love to use Postgres 12. The endpoints are ok, but we end up implementing our own to better meet our use cases. Best practices incur additional data transfer costs. I would expect those not to be charged.,10,We can handle our seasonal growth without any problems. We have headroom to continue growing.,Amazon Relational Database Service, IBM Cloud Databases (formerly Compose) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2),8,Amazon Kinesis, Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)great RDBMS that can scale up and replicate very wellI use Amazon Aurora as a relational database in the cloud in the aws eco-system mainly as a SQL data-store for transaction analytics. Find it really superior for its sheer faster performance as a relational data base - much faster than a traditional RDBMS data base and is much cheaper than some its competitors. It is offered as 'database as a service' and hence the worries of finding hardware to provision is not there and can get quickly started.,used as a supplement to mySQL database in the business for SQL sheer power of performance is much faster supports data growth/data storage and having replicas of databases very well,ability to read faster from the replicas in the event that there is a problem with Amazon Aurora - there is a latency involved and this can be reduced supports only a particular version of mySQl 5.16.10 and hence does not work with older versions,9,good RDBMS at a much cheaper price than some of the older/bigger competitors able to support large workloads,,Apache Kafka, Hadoop, SAP HANAAmazon Aurora ReviewAmazon Aurora is a PaaS database product from AWS that is a drop-in replacement for existing workloads utilizing either a MySQL or PostgreSQL backend that improves upon the database engine performance of those open source projects. We leverage Aurora for its simple scaling without having to take a cluster down, and find its auto-scaling storage to be a better fit for our workloads than having to guess ahead of time and over-provision.,Performance: We utilize Aurora as a PostgreSQL replacement, and Aurora's throughput is up to 3 times higher. Simple Instance Auto-Scaling: We can scale the underlying database engine up or down with no down time. Auto-Growing Storage: Rather than having to over-provision, Aurora automatically adds blocks of 10GB to your storage cluster up to multiple terabytes of storage.,Support for additional engines: Right now, Aurora is limited to MySQL and PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL-specific Instance Types: The PostgreSQL has high minimum instance type variants; while MySQL can take advantage of t3 instances, the minimum PostgreSQL instance is too large for lower-budget workflows and tests/debugging.,9,Has enabled us to not pay for over provisioned database storage that we may or may not need thanks to auto-scaling features. Per-second replica ability gives us peace of mind.,Amazon Relational Database Service,Amazon Relational Database Service, MongoDB Atlas, FirebaseAmazon's opensource relational database serviceAmazon Aurora is a relational database as a service which supports MySQL and Postgres DBs on AWS. My organization uses a lot of serverless features on AWS for developing microservices. In this regard, we use AWS Lambda for microservices and Amazon Aurora for a relational database. This is a lightweight maintenance-less option of providing microservices without having to maintain the infrastructure including AMI rehydrations on AWS.,Aurora is a relational database as a service on AWS which is MySQL and Postgres compatible. So if you are looking for a serverless option which going through need to host and manage a database then Aurora as a service is great. It is a simple and cost-effective open source database which is much cheaper than a normal database cost. Hence very efficient for microservices database where you do not need one very large centralized database but many small databases that are available and low latency. Aurora provides high performance and low latency. Last year they also announced multi-master in the same region and read replicas in multiple regions. This is very convenient if you are trying to design and build a highly reliable application.,Just like AWS DynamoDB which is a not a SQL solution and is truly a global DB, it would be great if AWS Aurora can become a global DB. What that means is that it is multi-region multi-master. That way writes to different regions of AWS would all be in sync and available in replicas on different regions.,9,The costs of Aurora is 5x and 3x less than RDS MySql and Postgres on AWS. Hence tremendous cost savings. Bring up your database in a matter of minutes. This is very crucial for quick solutions on the cloud. Best suited for serverless backend solutions for microservices. Highly secure for banking applications with AWS KMS.,Amazon Relational Database Service, PostgreSQL and MySQL,Amazon Relational Database Service, Kubernetes, DatadogA Serverless Future for a Database from the PastThe engineering team uses Amazon Aurora Serverless to rapidly build services that are inexpensive to operate and maintain. Aurora Serverless is an ideal datastore for low-volume or bursty services that can tolerate its cold starts; services consumed by batch jobs are an example. Amazon Aurora Serverless is a fast MySQL 5.6-compatible datastore; it helps our small team because it is managed and very inexpensive.,Aurora's throughput is great compared to MySQL and MariaDB. Aurora Serverless's pay-per-use makes it very inexpensive when used for services that are idle most of the day. This helps us adhere to the one-database-per-microservice pattern; cost is no longer a concern. Aurora is mostly managed. Administering databases will never be a competitive advantage for my company. Aurora has great integration with other AWS products, like DMS.,Cold-starts are part of the Aurora Serverless compromise, but they are painful nonetheless. We're accustomed to sub-second metering for AWS Lambda; Aurora Serverless has 1-minute minimums for resources. Aurora Serverless is compatible with MySQL 5.6. MySQL 5.6 lacks many of the features PostgreSQL users will expect.,9,Aurora Serverless has allowed us to inexpensively implement best-practices for our microservices architecture. Aurora is mostly managed; our engineers can focus on features instead of database administration. Aurora is capable of high throughput. Speed is not our first priority, but we still benefit from it.,Amazon Relational Database Service, Amazon DynamoDB, MySQL, MariaDB and PostgreSQL,MySQL, PostgreSQL, PyCharmGreat performance and easy transition from MySQLWe use Amazon Aurora as our primary data store which underlies the bulk of our system operations - primarily via web APIs. Its used beneath a PHP stack as a MySQL compatible cluster in a master-slave configuration. We also have master-only clusters for our development and test environments.,The MySQL compatibility meant we didn't have to change anything in our system which used to run on a MySQL database. It was a very simple configuration change to point at the new instance once set up Much better performance than our previous MySQL database (hosted on AWS RDS) for lower costs due to the way storage is managed Storage management is much more simple as it grows and shrinks with you without having to allocate and deallocate storage to the database,Without direct access to the instances it isn't possible to do a few things you'd be able to do if you were running your own database server, but this is rarely an issue,10,Moderately reduced database running costs Improved performance of database cluster which in turn has had a positive impact on the response times of our API services,Amazon RDS, Amazon Relational Database Service and MySQL,AWS Lambda, AWS OpsWorks, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon ElastiCacheAmazon Aurora - A Boost on Standard MySQLCloud services are the trend. No infrastructure costs and no worries. Cloud databases are also the trend, as they can be easily scalable and upgraded. As a senior consultant I recently configured an Amazon Aurora database to serve as the back-end of an organization software. This software included a main server providing services for mobile applications and also as a back-office web application to manage transaction information. These services relied on the Amazon Aurora database to collect and save information. Customer needed a database accessible from everywhere, with high availability, fast, always up to date and scalable as it was expected the business to grow as well as its storage needs. The Amazon Aurora turned out to be a stable solution with high performance when compared with in-house solutions like MySQL.,Amazon Aurora has high availability, since the customer started to use it, the database never had to be left out of service. Amazon Aurora provides frequent and automated upgrades, which makes our database system always up to date on the latest features and security practices Since Amazon Aurora uses MySQL as its core database, it is very easy to find specialized people to work. Amazon’s relational database management system also makes it very easy to expand and create new databases,The cost of Amazon Aurora when compared to a simple MySQL instance is considerably higher, so we really need to look at and run some performance tests to compare if the performance improvements are worth the extra cost. Although backup restores are a rare feature to use, when we need them it is always painful to restore our data. We are always searching for a database service to provide new and innovating features in terms of data recovery. For instance, being able to search on backup information to see if the needed data is there. It is a very common need to compare the hot data with the backup data, for example to fix some database data that a malfunction application wrongly updated. Since aurora is an Amazon relational database service there is no way to run a dev database on a local storage for tests and development.,8,The customers where we implemented Amazon Aurora database don't need to have an employee specialized in features and security upgrades. The database replication and schedule for backup tasks are much easier, so less prone to errors. We have never had a database downtime on our applications, which is essential for our customer business.,MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB and Microsoft SQL Server,MySQL, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL ServerUsing Amazon Aurora to better your software and development team!Amazon Aurora is used by my organization as the backend for our software. Previously, we hosted our own mysql servers which inevitably due to lack of resources ran behind on updates and thus performed more poorly than it should. Moving to Amazon Aurora has improved performance for a database that was poorly designed at the start and was operating on a slowly outdated MySQL version. Moving to Amazon Aurora not only improved performance, but allows my company to continue with fewer resources but yet have the advantage of a database that is more stable and stays up to date with the latest features. Since moving to Amazon Aurora, we also have fewer replication errors since Aurora does this flawlessly.,Automated maintenance for upgrades is by far the most superior feature of Amazon Aurora. Never be behind on upgrades again! Performance improvements for poorly structured schema due to enhancements added by Amazon. Replication works flawlessly due to added security measures added into Amazon Aurora which prevents admin users from "accidentally" breaking the slave instance. Amazon Aurora is hosted on Amazon's RDBMS which also includes quick and easy setup of new database instances.,I'd like to see Amazon Aurora get ahead of the curve on MySQL and introduce their own improvements to MySQL to make it a superior database so that I don't need to use SQL Server or Oracle to get performance improvements. For example, improve performance of views. Amazon Aurora needs to improve the ability to restore backups as needed. Currently, the user can only restore an entire instance to a new or existing RDBMS instance. If you need to retrieve data from a single table, this can be tedious after waiting hours for an entire restore to complete. Instead, allow the user to select a database to restore. Better yet, allow the user to restore a database backup to ANOTHER database - which would allow you to restore a database on the same instance. Again beat MySQL to the punch and introduce REAL server to server communication since they have disabled the "Federated Engine" which was the only way previously to do this. I'd like to be able to setup MySQL instances to talk to other MySQL instances.,7,The main positive for my team is the time that has been freed up from the tasks of managing updates and fixing replication issues. A negative for myself as a database administrator is removal of features that were available in Mysql. Examples include 1) the use of the storage engines other than InnoDB (such as the Federated Storage Engine), 2) certain administrative privileges such as ability to export to csv file and easy ability to kill processes. I seem to also forget they removed the built-in kill ability and you must use their own provided kill functionality.,MySQL, PostgreSQL and Microsoft SQL Server,JIRA Software, HipChatUnspecified
Amazon Aurora
56 Ratings
Score 9.2 out of 101
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  3. Amazon Aurora Reviews

Amazon Aurora Reviews

Amazon Aurora
56 Ratings
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Score 9.2 out of 101

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Arthur Zubarev profile photo
October 04, 2019

Old Database New Again: AWS Aurora, and it Shines

Arthur Zubarev
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Amazon Aurora has been chosen as a drop-in replacement for another popular, but a less affordable relational data storage engine. At time of this writing the system is getting ready to be commissioned in for production use on a select application basis. Given the adoption is, and it appears to be very positive, Amazon Aurora will be the sole choice for any other future implementations and serve as a replacement to other transactional databases. My personal view of what business problems Aurora solves or addresses well:
  • Aurora stands out in clustering (or multi-zone high availability) provided out of the box
  • DBA-less (almost) solution, at least the server-side aspect is muted, no patching or any hardening to make
  • Scale horizontally or vertically, or both.
  • The serverless option is attractive for ad-hoc use
  • Read-only replicas for robust analytics
  • Easy of programmability, supported by most drivers immediately
  • Easy scaling - can be either horizontal and/or vertical.
  • Nearly seamless backups, easy management.
  • 0 worries about server-side security.
  • Secondaries: up to 15 read-only replicas are enough even for very analytics hungry enterprises plus it makes all the data immutable.
  • Speed: it is hard to say 100% accurately, but in my view, Aurora beats all in the cost to speed ratio.
  • The Small and Medium instances are only good for testing or development, the number of connections and resources is limited.
  • The 5.7 as the latest version of AWS Aurora in MySQL compatibility is behind feature-wise to what the most recent release of MySQL offers (the same applies to Postgres mode).
  • Some odd or sub-optimal configuration values with some parameters not changeable.
  • No online development experience. So one must rely on Open Source tooling that is typically subpar to commercial offerings which in turn often are pricey and requires a desktop environment. I wish AWS Cloud 9 could offer in the Cloud Aurora development.
The pros:
  1. Completely DBA-less (or nearly so)
  2. Can replace most RDBMs
  3. Ideal for fast-growing companies or those that need to scale out and back. This is not so easy with say NoSQL or Hadoop-based products
  4. For most programmers or database developers, starting to code against MySQL is an easy thing, most mature programming languages have a native driver, MySQL shell
  5. Good enough for simple analytics as enterprise reporting, so it can forfeit the need for a dedicated data mart or even a data warehouse
The cons:
  1. Can be ~ 20% costlier than just a self-managed MySQL instance
  2. Outdated version-wise compared to where Oracle's MySQL is
  3. As a result of the older version used some analytical functionality is beyond reach for ordinary developers or analysts or requires the use of mature commercial tools
Read Arthur Zubarev's full review
Jesse Bickel, MS - PMP profile photo
June 21, 2019

High-Speed, Low-Cost and logins for years. Amazon Aurora filled a huge need!

Jesse Bickel, MS - PMP
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Our organization has a need to store massive amounts of logs in AWS S3 storage. We use Amazon Aurora to query against that data and avoid using high priced third-party logging indexing software and their hot storage. AWS Athena use is isolated to our development teams and business analysts only. The main purpose for our organization using Amazon Aurora is simply cost savings and further centralizing under the AWS platform.
  • Amazon Aurora's billing style is ideal. You only pay for what and when you use it. If you store large amounts of data but do not need to query against it, there is no cost until you do.
  • Amazon Aurora is highly supported and has seemed to be supported by a knowledgeable staff. While the use rolled into our premium support agreement, we found their staff and training resources to be well above average.
  • The speed is industry leading relational database. That simple. Faster, more secure and reliable.
  • While the service is outstanding there does seem to be a routine issue in connecting or keeping connections to Amazon RDS DB Instances at times or the connection is slow. I think clearer documentation would be highly beneficial here.
  • Increased logs or discovery notes in the event of a replication failure.
Amazon Aurora is an ideal and industry-leading storage subsystem that allows you to manage costs utilizing the data but also accessing the data with incredible speed. The database engine seems to really leverage the benefits of Amazon's distributed storage and scaling of that storage. Aurora eliminated numerous manual processes and reduces operational overhead in processing & replication. Depending on how often and quickly you need access to those databases will determine if this is a fit for your organization. If you need constant hot storage and access full time this is not ideal. If you can tolerate the process of a query than this is highly effective.
Read Jesse Bickel, MS - PMP's full review
No photo available
August 07, 2019

Amazon Aurora is the database to lookout for in the future

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Amazon Aurora is essentially a relational database as a service on AWS. Since it is cloud-based, there are many advantages to its name. First of all, it is a server-less database which essentially means that you do not need to host a physical server and provide space for it. Secondly, it is a pay-per-use model which means you only pay whenever you use it, which is a great feature if you do not make everyday queries into the database. Since it is again an amazing product from Amazon, it fits very well in the AWS ecosystem. You can use it to scale your database as per your needs, no need to buy server space and resources in advance, then not use them. It can scale and descale according to your needs.
  • It is a high performance and low latency database. You can also be assured of the high-availability of the database and the services hosted.
  • The Security provided by Amazon is again top notch because all of the data is encrypted and secured. The customers feel much more relaxed and assured when the project is using Amazon Aurora to host their services.
  • A big plus point for Amazon Aurora is the latest and impactful upgrades which it brings in the package. The automated up-gradation and maintenance is an outstanding feature which it provides to receive and stay up to date with the latest upgrades in the DB world.
  • It is compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. It essentially means that the database is able to support the old data-sets and tools which were being used on those DB's. This is a great advantage because it is essentially backward compatible.
  • The Amazon technical team behind the development of this software is very knowledgeable and supportive as well. We told our requirements clearly and they suggested the best use of the database for us, which scenario it should be used, and which it is not a perfect fit.
  • I think the biggest point for a project or team to consider is the cost. Although it can scale and descale according to your requirements, still you need to be cautious and have a vision of how big your database is going to be, how complex it is going to be, and how much does latency matter. You need to factor all those decisions before going to spend extra on Amazon Aurora as compared to a simple MySQL database.
  • It suffers from Clod start which is a very well known aspect of the product. But the recovery part is also not up to the mark. They need to improve on the ability to restore a copy of the backup, but mostly it is seen that the copy is corrupted or not the latest one.
  • It does allow us to add new nodes to the existing cluster but we need to be wary of that the new nodes are read-only nodes. All the functions of write/update will still be carried out by the master node only.
Amazon Aurora is best suited for creating complex, highly available and commercial databases, in a very straightforward way. The database size should be medium to large because only then will you be able to justify the extra cost incurred for using Amazon Aurora. Another aspect is that if you are already using AWS and most of your applications and services are on the cloud, then it makes sense to use Amazon Aurora since it fits in the Amazon ecosystem really well.
Read this authenticated review
No photo available
October 18, 2019

Very happy with Aurora, especially operationally.

Verified User
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
We use it as our primary data store for customer data. It allows us to handle our large traffic load during peak hours. We use a variable number of reader nodes depending on traffic.
  • Adding and removing reader nodes is seamless
  • Failover is fast
  • Low replication delay on reader nodes
  • Some quirks exist with corner case behaviors. e.g. we had some perf issues with GIN indexes.
  • A little slow to provide the latest Postgres versions. We'd love to use Postgres 12.
  • The endpoints are ok, but we end up implementing our own to better meet our use cases.
  • Best practices incur additional data transfer costs. I would expect those not to be charged.
Variable read load. Being able to autoscale your DB is amazing. Operationally, not worrying about failover is also amazing. Outside of Aurora/RDS, Postgres failover is always a big pain. Even on plain RDS, there's some concern with data loss in a failover.
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Shiv Shivakumar profile photo
December 14, 2018

great RDBMS that can scale up and replicate very well

Shiv Shivakumar
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
I use Amazon Aurora as a relational database in the cloud in the aws eco-system mainly as a SQL data-store for transaction analytics. Find it really superior for its sheer faster performance as a relational data base - much faster than a traditional RDBMS data base and is much cheaper than some its competitors. It is offered as 'database as a service' and hence the worries of finding hardware to provision is not there and can get quickly started.
  • used as a supplement to mySQL database in the business for SQL
  • sheer power of performance is much faster
  • supports data growth/data storage and having replicas of databases very well
  • ability to read faster from the replicas in the event that there is a problem with Amazon Aurora - there is a latency involved and this can be reduced
  • supports only a particular version of mySQl 5.16.10 and hence does not work with older versions
It works very well with mySQL and can supplement it very nicely with much faster performance and its ability to scale up as well as replicate data across multiple clusters. In addition it is very well suited for large workloads of an enterprise that is looking to get up and running quickly on a managed RDBMS service without worrying about licenses/provisioning and the like.
Read Shiv Shivakumar's full review
No photo available
March 11, 2019

Amazon Aurora Review

Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Amazon Aurora is a PaaS database product from AWS that is a drop-in replacement for existing workloads utilizing either a MySQL or PostgreSQL backend that improves upon the database engine performance of those open source projects. We leverage Aurora for its simple scaling without having to take a cluster down, and find its auto-scaling storage to be a better fit for our workloads than having to guess ahead of time and over-provision.
  • Performance: We utilize Aurora as a PostgreSQL replacement, and Aurora's throughput is up to 3 times higher.
  • Simple Instance Auto-Scaling: We can scale the underlying database engine up or down with no down time.
  • Auto-Growing Storage: Rather than having to over-provision, Aurora automatically adds blocks of 10GB to your storage cluster up to multiple terabytes of storage.
  • Support for additional engines: Right now, Aurora is limited to MySQL and PostgreSQL.
  • PostgreSQL-specific Instance Types: The PostgreSQL has high minimum instance type variants; while MySQL can take advantage of t3 instances, the minimum PostgreSQL instance is too large for lower-budget workflows and tests/debugging.
For workloads that already use, or plan on using, MySQL or PostgreSQL, Aurora is our new go-to favorite deployment option for projects on AWS. The best use cases for Aurora will be substantial workloads that are well-suited to the simple scaling controls (both from an instance type perspective, as well as storage perspective), and will benefit from Aurora's simple, very low latency read replicas. Aurora is extremely fault tolerant and has improved self-healing ability.
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No photo available
February 08, 2019

Amazon's opensource relational database service

Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Review Source
Amazon Aurora is a relational database as a service which supports MySQL and Postgres DBs on AWS.
My organization uses a lot of serverless features on AWS for developing microservices. In this regard, we use AWS Lambda for microservices and Amazon Aurora for a relational database.

This is a lightweight maintenance-less option of providing microservices without having to maintain the infrastructure including AMI rehydrations on AWS.
  • Aurora is a relational database as a service on AWS which is MySQL and Postgres compatible. So if you are looking for a serverless option which going through need to host and manage a database then Aurora as a service is great.
  • It is a simple and cost-effective open source database which is much cheaper than a normal database cost. Hence very efficient for microservices database where you do not need one very large centralized database but many small databases that are available and low latency.
  • Aurora provides high performance and low latency. Last year they also announced multi-master in the same region and read replicas in multiple regions. This is very convenient if you are trying to design and build a highly reliable application.
  • Just like AWS DynamoDB which is a not a SQL solution and is truly a global DB, it would be great if AWS Aurora can become a global DB. What that means is that it is multi-region multi-master. That way writes to different regions of AWS would all be in sync and available in replicas on different regions.
Many places where Aurora is well suited:

  • If you are trying to build a serverless backend.
  • Amazon hosted relational database service (RDS). So we do not have to manage the database maintenance.
  • Backup and archival can be done to AWS S3, which is very convenient.
  • It provides high performance and scalability.
  • It's very secure. You could use AWS Key management service (KMS) to encrypt and store data on AWS Aurora.
Read this authenticated review
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January 17, 2019

A Serverless Future for a Database from the Past

Verified User
Score 9 out of 10
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Verified User
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The engineering team uses Amazon Aurora Serverless to rapidly build services that are inexpensive to operate and maintain. Aurora Serverless is an ideal datastore for low-volume or bursty services that can tolerate its cold starts; services consumed by batch jobs are an example. Amazon Aurora Serverless is a fast MySQL 5.6-compatible datastore; it helps our small team because it is managed and very inexpensive.
  • Aurora's throughput is great compared to MySQL and MariaDB.
  • Aurora Serverless's pay-per-use makes it very inexpensive when used for services that are idle most of the day. This helps us adhere to the one-database-per-microservice pattern; cost is no longer a concern.
  • Aurora is mostly managed. Administering databases will never be a competitive advantage for my company.
  • Aurora has great integration with other AWS products, like DMS.
  • Cold-starts are part of the Aurora Serverless compromise, but they are painful nonetheless.
  • We're accustomed to sub-second metering for AWS Lambda; Aurora Serverless has 1-minute minimums for resources.
  • Aurora Serverless is compatible with MySQL 5.6. MySQL 5.6 lacks many of the features PostgreSQL users will expect.
Amazon Aurora Serverless is great for micro-services and serverless. If DynamoDB's pricing structure and management appeal to you, but you want a RDBMS, consider Amazon Aurora Serverless. If you have a microservices architecture and are apprehensive about the cost of one-RDS-instance-per-service for every test cluster, consider Amazon Aurora Serverless. Aurora MySQL lacks many features you'd expect from PostgreSQL; the absence of these features may be more tolerable for OLTP use-cases than OLAP use-cases.
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Andrew Raines profile photo
April 20, 2018

Great performance and easy transition from MySQL

Andrew Raines
Score 10 out of 10
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We use Amazon Aurora as our primary data store which underlies the bulk of our system operations - primarily via web APIs. Its used beneath a PHP stack as a MySQL compatible cluster in a master-slave configuration. We also have master-only clusters for our development and test environments.
  • The MySQL compatibility meant we didn't have to change anything in our system which used to run on a MySQL database. It was a very simple configuration change to point at the new instance once set up
  • Much better performance than our previous MySQL database (hosted on AWS RDS) for lower costs due to the way storage is managed
  • Storage management is much more simple as it grows and shrinks with you without having to allocate and deallocate storage to the database
  • Without direct access to the instances it isn't possible to do a few things you'd be able to do if you were running your own database server, but this is rarely an issue
When already using a relational database, either MySQL or PostgreSQL, the change to Amazon Aurora should be very straightforward. The main benefits you get are cost efficiency and ease with regards to the storage, as it scales with you, and managing clusters including failovers are made very straightforward for you.

If you are looking for a database which can scale up and down quickly with demand, Aurora may not be the best fit. However, there is now an Amazon Aurora Serverless service which attempts to address this requirement. I do not have any experience with it, so cannot comment further - but it is possible it will fit your use-case.
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Vasco Mendes profile photo
October 26, 2017

Amazon Aurora - A Boost on Standard MySQL

Vasco Mendes
Score 8 out of 10
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Cloud services are the trend. No infrastructure costs and no worries. Cloud databases are also the trend, as they can be easily scalable and upgraded.

As a senior consultant I recently configured an Amazon Aurora database to serve as the back-end of an organization software. This software included a main server providing services for mobile applications and also as a back-office web application to manage transaction information. These services relied on the Amazon Aurora database to collect and save information. Customer needed a database accessible from everywhere, with high availability, fast, always up to date and scalable as it was expected the business to grow as well as its storage needs. The Amazon Aurora turned out to be a stable solution with high performance when compared with in-house solutions like MySQL.
  • Amazon Aurora has high availability, since the customer started to use it, the database never had to be left out of service.
  • Amazon Aurora provides frequent and automated upgrades, which makes our database system always up to date on the latest features and security practices
  • Since Amazon Aurora uses MySQL as its core database, it is very easy to find specialized people to work. Amazon’s relational database management system also makes it very easy to expand and create new databases
  • The cost of Amazon Aurora when compared to a simple MySQL instance is considerably higher, so we really need to look at and run some performance tests to compare if the performance improvements are worth the extra cost.
  • Although backup restores are a rare feature to use, when we need them it is always painful to restore our data. We are always searching for a database service to provide new and innovating features in terms of data recovery. For instance, being able to search on backup information to see if the needed data is there. It is a very common need to compare the hot data with the backup data, for example to fix some database data that a malfunction application wrongly updated.
  • Since aurora is an Amazon relational database service there is no way to run a dev database on a local storage for tests and development.
Amazon Aurora should be considered for those who need a fast and reliable cloud database service. It includes the main features of a MySQL database, using the latest trends in architectural principals. It ensures out-of-the-box fault-tolerance and high scalability. It is also very important for those who don’t want to worry about features and security updates. As the price is higher than a standard MySQL for instance, it should only be considered for higher applications where performance and scalability is really important.
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May 02, 2017

Using Amazon Aurora to better your software and development team!

Verified User
Score 7 out of 10
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Amazon Aurora is used by my organization as the backend for our software. Previously, we hosted our own MySQL servers which inevitably due to lack of resources ran behind on updates and thus performed more poorly than it should. Moving to Amazon Aurora has improved performance for a database that was poorly designed at the start and was operating on a slowly outdated MySQL version. Moving to Amazon Aurora not only improved performance, but allows my company to continue with fewer resources but yet have the advantage of a database that is more stable and stays up to date with the latest features. Since moving to Amazon Aurora, we also have fewer replication errors since Aurora does this flawlessly.
  • Automated maintenance for upgrades is by far the most superior feature of Amazon Aurora. Never be behind on upgrades again!
  • Performance improvements for poorly structured schema due to enhancements added by Amazon.
  • Replication works flawlessly due to added security measures added into Amazon Aurora which prevents admin users from "accidentally" breaking the slave instance.
  • Amazon Aurora is hosted on Amazon's RDBMS which also includes quick and easy setup of new database instances.
  • I'd like to see Amazon Aurora get ahead of the curve on MySQL and introduce their own improvements to MySQL to make it a superior database so that I don't need to use SQL Server or Oracle to get performance improvements. For example, improve performance of views.
  • Amazon Aurora needs to improve the ability to restore backups as needed. Currently, the user can only restore an entire instance to a new or existing RDBMS instance. If you need to retrieve data from a single table, this can be tedious after waiting hours for an entire restore to complete. Instead, allow the user to select a database to restore. Better yet, allow the user to restore a database backup to ANOTHER database - which would allow you to restore a database on the same instance.
  • Again beat MySQL to the punch and introduce REAL server to server communication since they have disabled the "Federated Engine" which was the only way previously to do this. I'd like to be able to setup MySQL instances to talk to other MySQL instances.
Amazon Aurora (as is MySQL) is better suited for light to medium applications considering it still has some performance limitations from MySQL. I would not recommend it for enterprise level use without a carefully constructed backend system (code and database). My company's current backend architecture was not mapped out very well and this leads to performance problems that even Amazon Aurora has not been able to completely sort (although it has been a huge help).

Another area where I am finding it beginning to lack is for use in data warehousing. The more rows added, the less performant I'm finding the data warehouse. Although to be fair, Amazon has another product (Redshift) that we are looking to migrate data warehouses into.
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Amazon Aurora Scorecard Summary

Likelihood to Recommend (56)
9.2
Support (2)
8.0

About Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL compatible relational database system from Amazon Web Services.
Categories:  Relational Databases

Amazon Aurora Technical Details

Operating Systems: Unspecified
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