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Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora

Overview

What is Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora is a global-scale relational database service built for the cloud with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility.

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Recent Reviews

Amazon RDS Aurora.

9 out of 10
September 25, 2023
Incentivized
Amazon aurora was used for audit purposes. The main purpose was to audit IoT device activities performed by end user. All the information …
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AWS Aurora Review

8 out of 10
September 22, 2023
Incentivized
In our organization, we leverage Amazon Aurora as a critical component of our database infrastructure. Aurora is a high-performance, fully …
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Cost effective

9 out of 10
September 19, 2023
Incentivized
  • Primarily use it in our core payments platform given that we need strong ACID properties but we’re looking to transition to dynamodb soon …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 6 features
  • Automated backups (25)
    9.5
    95%
  • Database scalability (26)
    9.4
    94%
  • Automatic software patching (26)
    8.9
    89%
  • Monitoring and metrics (25)
    8.7
    87%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Features

Database-as-a-Service

Database as a Service (DBaaS) software, sometimes referred to as cloud database software, is the delivery of database services ocer the Internet as a service

9.1
Avg 8.7
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Service Offering Details

What is Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora is a MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database built for the cloud, built to combine the performance and availability of enterprise databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases. The vendor states Amazon Aurora is up to 5X faster than MySQL databases and 3X faster than PostgreSQL databases, and that it provides the security, availability, and reliability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost.

Amazon Aurora features a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 64TB per database instance. It delivers performance and availability with up to 15 low-latency read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across three Availability Zones (AZs).

The vendor invites readers to learn more details on how they designed Amazon Aurora, from AWS CTO, Werner Vogels.

Amazon Aurora Screenshots

Screenshot of A look inside the RDS console.

Amazon Aurora Videos

How to create a first database cluster on Amazon Aurora.
What's new in Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora Availability

GeographyNAMER, EMEA, APAC, LATAM
Supported LanguagesEnglish, French, Chinese, Korean, Japanese

Frequently Asked Questions

Amazon Aurora is a global-scale relational database service built for the cloud with full MySQL and PostgreSQL compatibility.

Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, and PostgreSQL are common alternatives for Amazon Aurora.

Reviewers rate Automated backups highest, with a score of 9.5.

The most common users of Amazon Aurora are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(160)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 30)
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September 22, 2023

AWS Aurora Review

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
In our organization, we leverage Amazon Aurora as a critical component of our database infrastructure. Aurora is a high-performance, fully managed relational database service that provides compatibility with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Our organization uses Amazon Aurora to address several business problems and improve the efficiency and reliability of our applications.
  • High Availability and Fault Tolerance
  • High Performance
  • Backup and Restore feature
  • It has a limited support for non-SQL/PostgreSQL engines
  • More integration with other AWS services
Amazon Aurora is very well suited in situations where the application requires high scalability and has variable and unpredictable workloads. Also, real-time analysis and reporting could be performed easily using Aurora's read replica feature. Aurora might not be a good fit for applications that rely more on other cloud-based services such as Azure since there are some issues with regards to integrations.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use RDS/Amazon Aurora for some of our legacy databases that we need to retain for governmental reporting on a low frequency basis.
  • Scalability
  • Enable and disable database as needed
  • Database administration
  • Training and examples for vairoud use cases
Perfect for using it workloads where you don't need your database running all day long everyday. With Aurora, you can start and stop the database on demand and save costs also.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon Aurora is a relational database service offered by AWS that is designed for high performance, availability, and scalability. It's compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. We use both MySQL and PostgreSQL for our client databases. Depending on our needs.
  • High availability.
  • Compatibility.
  • High throughput.
  • Cost
  • Complexity
For running a high-traffic e-commerce solution that needs to handle a massive stream of user data, products and deal with inventory updates. It works really well and you can easily add replicas to deal with i.e. load balancing.
September 20, 2023

A powerful RDBMS

Ayush Dutta | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
A perfect and powerful database management system, I received this application from one of my colleagues, after changing from many DBs like one them is MongoDB.
It has a powerful life of taking a huge amounts of data, as for long I have been working with data, I wanted a powerful and well working database system for working efficiently and effectively with my data works, well this application has a cool and powerful chain system for making relationships with various data. I loved it.
  • Powerful data handling
  • Migration facility
  • Cost effective application
  • GUI
  • Interaction
I used many Database management systems , I have even used MySQL, but yeah this is worth of cost and have a good security system, and has a faster deliver speed, which works smoothly and efficiently. Having this I have now stopped looking for other powerful databases, this is a perfect tool for large data handlers.
September 19, 2023

Amazon Aurora Internals

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is very useful
  • High performance
  • high availability
  • scalability
  • Limited Availability of Compatibility Versions
  • Complexity in Cross-Region Replication
  • Storage Scaling Limitations
High Traffic Web Applications:Aurora is an excellent choice for high-traffic web applications that require fast response times and high availability. Its ability to scale both read and write operations makes it a strong contender.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon Aurora helps me and my organisation to collect and review in the course of analyzing the query performance. It is very persuasive in nature. Even we can write codes using three easy accessible steps and even it stores six backups eventually while writing the codes in their platform. Best thing about this Aurora is if our one of the instance has been failed this will automatically use replicas to repair them and also create new instance automatically. Even their servers are clean and their indexing capabilities are complete.
  • Able to work on very big databases without any interruptions.
  • One of the best things about Aurora is everything is hosted in the cloud with wider capabilities.
  • It is easy to implement, and the interface is easy to access.
  • Very quick instances can be connected without the loss of data.
  • Its interface is quite simple but repetitive in nature.
  • Database authentication problems can be improved.
  • Sometimes logical errors occur which is annoying in nature.
Best thing about Aurora is that it is server less and relational database. I like it personally because of its performance which is quite impressive and its instances provide us a great experience. Also if Aurora have a script embedded in it so that we can our queries easily and there will be no requirement of other services to make the connection of the database.
September 19, 2023

Cost effective

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Primarily use it in our core payments platform given that we need strong ACID properties but we’re looking to transition to dynamodb soon given that dynamodb also has transaction semantics
  • It is our de facto database for starting any new microservice
  • Cost effective relational database
  • High availability in multiple regions
  • Fully managed
  • I/O costs are incurred
  • Not fully MySQL compatible especially if you’re using something very specific to mysql
  • Might hit the upper limit on max number of connections
  • Great for when you need ACID/strong transaction semantics, dealing with financial data or anything structured
  • As you keep scaling beyond sharding/partitioning particularly for unstructured data it makes sense to start exploring NoSql/DynamoDb for your needs as somethings like scaling are achieved automatically with dynamodb. It’s sort of like have a dial where you can scale up or down based on the needs of your system.
Iván García | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
As any company that have to use a database to store information not only for the business data but also for different applications, we decided to use Aurora MySQL to ease the administration and be safe that AWS will handle all patching, updates, backups and maintenance of the database.
  • No need to provision storage nor IOPS for the disks
  • Automatics continuos backups with the possibility to point-in-time restore in new database or backtrack to a point in time in the same database
  • Increase availability by using Read Replicas and also distributing read capacity using them for queries
  • If using Aurora Serverles v2 one thing missing is the possibility to reduce it to 0 ACU
If you are in need of an MySQL or PostgreSQL database, forget about using those engines on your own, installing and maintaining them in your own servers. Instead use Aurora MySQL or PostgreSQL compatibility on AWS. You will be free from the heavylifting by allowing RDS to take care of updates, patching, backups and maintenance of the database and servers.
You simply will have to connect to the dabase and take care of the data.
Judy L. Berglund | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon Aurora is characterized by high availability and performance in the cloud that few tools of the same characteristics offer, the cost is initially 10GB for free, but then costs increase but the amount of capacity used, however it can be really low and its use guarantees integrated security, with regular backups and fully protected by the Amazon Aurora system. It's a fully managed system which reduces the workload and automates many daily tasks that would take a lot of time to perform manually. Another important point to take into account is that the tool automatically recovers from any failure, if one of our instances fails the system uses replicas to repair them creating new instances automatically.
  • Efficient monitoring of databases such as SQL, etc.
  • Fully automatic scaling
  • Fully encrypted backups
  • Price
  • Complex configurations
  • Technical Support could be better
I think Amazon Aurora is well suited in the database arena. Amazon Aurora abstracts the connections of the database instances relationships, with a sophisticated link point mechanism, achieving more speed when processing intermediate data, which is extremely positive for large volumes of data that need to be processed quickly. In my experience, Amazon Aurora is a powerful tool when replicating data, since it manages everything in its platform with read-only queries.
September 18, 2023

Amazing Amazon Aurora

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon aurora to manage large quantities of data for our company. We are able to see different challenges and positives that we are having. It is useful to use in our case because we manage a large amount of data. This relational database is user friendly that we can assign our college hires to use
  • Data management
  • Relational data
  • Comparisons
  • Notifications
This software is well suited to use when you need to compare data between sites and quarters. It is very good at these times as it brings the data over clearly between these times. It helps to compare to other National data standards. It is less appropriate to use if you are not comparing the data to another time or other companies data.
August 31, 2023

Amazon Aurora Review

Alok Pabalkar | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon Aurora as our primary database used for hosting our Edtech SaaS Platform GIDE.AI
  • Transactional Queries
  • Storage Scale Up
  • Higher Performance
  • Compatibility with Mysql
  • Super Easy Cluster Mode setup
  • On the fly DB Vertical Scaling could be useful
  • Connection Display & stats can be present to see and improve app design
1. All Transactional Processes
2. Hosting a Web App
3. Storage of Structured Data
Manthan Dhola | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Aurora MySQL for the database of Magento 2. This handles the load very fine and is has 100% uptime with low resilience and no packet loss. Moreover we use Aurora for scalability from the Read replicas used for read transactions and scaling the database. The restore in time feature also allows us if we need to restore the database for specific time of the day.
  • 100% Uptime with no packet losses
  • Scalability with read replicas
  • fully managed database
  • Restore Point in Time
  • Handel more load than mysql
  • Parallel Queries supported
  • Improve Response time
  • Add write replica for scaling
  • database caching
  • Online Gaming Platforms
  • High Traffic Websites - Websites and web applications with heavy traffic loads can benefit from Aurora's scalability and read/write performance, ensuring responsive user experiences even during peak traffic times.
  • E-Commerce Platforms
  • Content Management Systems (CMS)
  • Analytical and Reporting Workloads - Organizations performing complex analytical queries and generating reports from large datasets can benefit from Aurora's performance optimizations and compatibility with popular reporting tools.
Brooke Steed | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our day to day work requires the handling of sensitive information day in and day out. That being said - Security and backups are absolutely crucial to the company's ability to successfully and ethically work. Amazon Aurora provides these services on the front and back end simultaniously while we focus on our objectives.
  • Provides continuous backups while other applications are running without causing any interruption in production.
  • Provides built-in security features i.e. encryption at rest and in-transit, making sure that our data is secure both during storage and transmission.
  • Allows us to easily monitor the database's performance metrics and analyze them to optimize query performance and identify any potential issues.
  • Improve the ability to handle time zone conversions and daylight saving time.
  • Geospatial data is becoming increasingly important in various applications, and Aurora currently lacks built-in support for geospatial data types and functions.
  • I think allowing and enchancing schema changes would improve the overall database management experience.
Overall, our experience as an individual and company has been very positive. Happy to suggest Amazon Aurora to counterparts while trying to build my book of business.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used Amazon Aurora to see how to increase the efficiency and learn AWS Services. Amazon Aurora Serverless is an on-demand, autoscaling configuration for Amazon Aurora. It automatically starts up, shuts down, and scales capacity up or down based on your application's needs. You can run your database in the cloud without managing any database instances. It is easy to use and super secure. On a data base instance running with aurora encryption, data store automated backup, replicas and snapshots in the same cluster.
  • Integration and Deployment
  • Service and Support
  • Product Capabilities
  • Security
  • Better price
  • Good documentation
  • High availability
As we just used the service to learn its basics, all systems seemed worked perfectly. I must say that overall, I’m very impressed. There are A LOT of limitations with this first release, but I believe that Amazon will do what Amazon does best, and keep iterating until this thing is rock solid.
Ed Mandret | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon does offer two relational database services, namely RDS and Aurora. While both very similar, there are key differences in how they persist data on disk. RDS uses EBS volumes, which are limited up to 16k concurrent IOPS. On the other hand, Aurora uses a virtual storage cluster that supports up to 80k concurrent IOPS. When dealing with large clients whose database usage might exceed the 16 concurrent IOPS threshold, Aurora was the preferred choice to ensure higher availability.
  • High-availability
  • Multi-AZ configuration
  • Serverless support
  • Crash recovery
  • Asynchronous replication lag
  • Opaque pricing
Thanks to a completely different storage orchestration layer, Aurora supports far more concurrent IOPS than its counterpart, Amazon RDS, which uses individual EBS volumes. Thus, Aurora truly shines where high-performance is a major concern.

Also, Aurora supports a serverless DB cluster option, which is able to scale up/down based on application needs to save money. This is particularly suited for intermittent, unpredictable or infrequent workloads, where performance and reliability still matter.
Avantika Sikand | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use Aurora to integrate it with the SaaS product which helps in database encryption as data security is an important aspect of the product I work for. Also the automated multi-Region replication, and integrations with other AWS services helps me use Aurora with more ease.
  • Scale Relational database
  • integration with cloudwatch helps with monitoring the database efficiently
  • Autoscaling of Aurora clusters
  • max connections
  • loading data from S3 bucket
  • database cloning
Aurora backs up the cluster volume automatically and retains restore data for the length of the backup retention period this helps in scenarios where application restore is needed. It also offers better disaster recovery so this can be used for supporting disaster recovery plans.While Amazon RDS supports five database engines, Amazon Aurora supports just two. If you use MariaDB, Oracle, or Microsoft SQL Server, you have to fall back to RDS.
April 03, 2023

Amazon Aurora Review

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Amazon Aurora to be as efficient as possible with our business. Specifically with data Amazon Aurora, we're able to store and aggregate the date we collect and use it to our advantage. It helps us find opportunities to pursue and other that aren't worth working towards. There are so many opportunities in this world and Amazon Aurora helps us decide what is to focus on.
  • Collect date
  • Aggregate data
  • Sort data
  • Sequence data
  • Customer service
  • Accessibility
  • Functionality
Amazon Aurora helps aggregate data to help business owners understand what people are looking at and how we can use that to drive sales. If a business is looking to help their customers tailor suit their needs, Amazon Aurora can provide the data that is needed to do that. In a day and age where data is so important Amazon Aurora can provide that,
Vasco Mendes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
James Hilton | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Aurora is our SQL solution for users, events, articles, and more. Aurora provides convenient scaling and availability in different physical locations.. The security and scaling are automated to support peaks in traffic and save money when it's quiet. The integration with other AWS services makes it convenient for us to use in all applications. The SQL language support made the migration from a dedicated MySQL server seamless in our codebase.
  • Automatic scaling of read replicas
  • Quick vertical scaling of server size
  • Scaling metrics to determine the right time to scale for cost efficiency
  • Self updates
  • Better explanations of configuration settings
  • Easier error logging when failovers are required
  • More information on best practices for common scenarios like when database size gets too big or queries slow down
It is best suited when you need an easily manageable auto-scaling relational database cluster in different secure locations on Amazon Web Services and not best suited when you're not using Amazon Web Services or you are seeking a cheaper option for testing only or for low traffic sites, or you require a NoSQL database instead.
Piyush Goel | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Aurora as the de-facto DBaaS product for hosting our Relational Databases, primarily MySQL. We have over 100 MySQL clusters (Master, Slave) across the microservices and the 5 global regions where Capillary's SaaS products are hosted. Prior to Aurora, all our databases were self-managed and hosted on EC2 instances with EBS volumes, having provisioned IOPS, for storage. As our system scaled, the management of the databases became a full-time job. Also, configuration management, upgrades, and regular maintenance started eating into the team's bandwidth. Furthermore, the chances of human errors and the consequent outages increased with the increase in the number of MySQL set-ups. To address these concerns, in early 2020, we migrated all our MySQL clusters from EC2 to Aurora. The Aurora service hosts over 400 TB of data, and the Aurora instances vary from 4 cores, 32GB RAM to 32 cores, 256 GB RAM configs. The storage layer varies anywhere from 200GB to 30 TB. In a nutshell, all relational, OLTP use-cases for the 700M odd end-consumers touched by Capillary's platform and served out of Aurora.
  • Auto-expansion of the disks. The administrators don't have to worry about disk sizes anymore.
  • Default configuration sets are designed for the majority of the OLTP use-cases. As a developer, I don't have to worry about tuning the MySQL configurations anymore.
  • Better Performance than MySQL hosted on EC2 instances. The Aurora architecture allows faster replication as well.
  • Access to slow query, and error logs is a little cumbersome. Maybe, stream that to an AWS Elasticsearch, and provide searching out of the box (even if it means additional costs).
  • Upgrade to higher versions of MySQL is a problem.
  • Failovers to replica, although, they are not needed often, they can be made more seamless.
Well Suited: If you have to manage 10 or more MySQL clusters in your environments. Better to use Aurora and configure via a Terraform provider. Don't have to worry about the scalability of your databases. It scaled beautifully with tons of features that make the scaling process easier. Don't have a dedicated infrastructure team. Use the managed service, and let your developers focus on product development.

Less Appropriate: It can be a bit pricey. If you are operating under a budget, this may not be the right tool. RDS is slightly cheaper than Aurora. Configurations and documentation can be confusing at times, but if you have access to the AWS Solution Architects, it gets easier.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Amazon Aurora offers a secure database for the functional requirement. The query system is very responsive and generates insightful metrics. The application has an efficient space management feature and is quite capable of storing big chunks of data. The feature is beneficial in instances where we need to take a backup of the entire drive and access data from a remote location.
  • Compatible with MySQL
  • Storage space management
  • Cross platform
  • Fail proof
  • The storage space is increased from 64 TiB to 128 but still, it is not enough for large organizations.
  • Compatibility issues with older MySQL.
  • MySQL features, like the MyISAM storage engine is missing.
Amazon Aurora is well suited for big organizations looking for a web-based -MySQL-linked cloud solution. The service is economical and offers a robust and dependable platform for storing big chunks of data. It provides fast database cloning and provides performance metrics, like query throughput and latency. With the older version of MySQL, it does not work properly.
Arthur Zubarev | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Michael Jenkins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Many teams at my company use Amazon Aurora for database provisioning and management. In my teams case, we rely on the "out of the box" capabilities of Aurora to give us open-source compatible databases that are highly available, fault tolerant, and self healing. The main problem that Aurora helps us address is minimizing the amount of time and effort we spend on deploying and managing our database infrastructure in addition to the data stored there.
  • High availability
  • Fault tolerance
  • Back up and restore
  • Open source database compatibility
  • Pricing: indeed there is a premium for using Aurora but the cost is worth the benefit of minimizing the time spent tending database infrastructure.
Aurora is great for situations where databases require autoscaling and need high availability. For example, high traffic websites running on an autoscaling compute layer can benefit by being connected to a datastore that can scale along with them. Also any scenario that requires fault tolerance can benefit greatly from Aurora. Knowing that your DB can heal itself (to the best of its ability) can give developers and engineers confidence that their application will handle adverse scenarios in the event of failure conditions. Given the premium of running DBs with Aurora, I would not recommend using it for development environments. Given that Aurora is compatible with most common DB software, development environments can use cheaper, smaller RDS instances. When it comes time for deploying into a production environment, no changes would be needed.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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