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Great performance and easy transition from MySQL
April 20, 2018

Great performance and easy transition from MySQL

Andrew Raines | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Aurora

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
  • 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
Using cloud-based services such as RDS or Aurora take all the hassle out of managing database servers yourself. It also gives you the flexibility to easily spin up and down additional instances and as when required. Where Aurora outshines RDS is in terms of performance - we saw around 2-5x improvement in query read times across the board.
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.