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Amazon Aurora Benefits Teams that Need a Rock Solid Database Management System
December 04, 2020

Amazon Aurora Benefits Teams that Need a Rock Solid Database Management System

Michael Jenkins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Aurora

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.
  • The premium cost can be a deterrent but its well worth it when the DB fixes itself without intervention from the engineering or DBA teams
  • The team has gained more confidence in deploying highly available DB infrastructure without the overhead of managing the underlying instances and coordinating the synchronization of a primary-secondary DB setup.
  • Aurora has saved the day for my team on multiple occasions by withstanding unexpected, spiky traffic
In comparison to other database management systems, RDS simplifies deployment, integration, and management. Its a managed service that is immediately compatible with the way we deploy other services in AWS, particularly compute services like EC2. There's no overhead when it comes to bringing the database resources online. We selected Aurora specifically because its easy to deploy and provides us with a DB layer that would be near impossible for us to implement on our own.

Do you think Amazon Aurora delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Amazon Aurora's feature set?

Yes

Did Amazon Aurora live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Amazon Aurora go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Amazon Aurora again?

Yes

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), AWS CodeBuild
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.

Amazon Aurora Support

AWS has been top notch in providing support for Aurora and RDS as a whole. For the most part, there is rarely ever a need to request support for our database deployments. The only interactions I can think of off hand are asking for increases in the number of instances we can deploy.

Using Amazon Aurora

Aurora is easy to deploy and operate from the AWS console, the command line, and with Infrastructure as Code tools like Cloudformation and Terraform. Integrating the endpoints into an application is easy because from the outside, the Aurora clusters look just like any other open source database. I have also seen benefit from using the instances within the cluster as distinct read and write endpoints allowing for further customization in our applications.