Item: Amazon Aurora
Rating: 10
Author: James Hilton

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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

Most Important Features

Auto scaling read replicas
Multi AZ with little effort required
Easily upgrade server size within minutes

Return on Investment

Aurora allowed us to produce events that support 5000 users on our website within a matter of minutes.
Aurora saves us time by auto-scaling daily based on concurrent requests or CPU usage.
Aurora storage space expands automatically as our database size grows so we don't have to spend time monitoring it.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon DynamoDB, MySQL and MongoDB

Aurora exists to provide the convenience of a MySQL style language with as many automated features as possible where AWS can manage them independently or provide a user interface or CLI to easily allow us as administrators and developers to configure the settings beyond the defaults to customize our performance, availability, and cost-efficiency.

Key Insights

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

Not sure

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

Other Software Used

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Amazon DynamoDB

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Users and Roles

5 - Developers run the website which stores the data for most of the company.

Support Headcount Required

5 - There's 5 developers who work with the database. They need to understand SQL and basic navigation of AWS

Business Processes Supported

Storing data
Scaling for changes in traffic
Providing CLI access
Providing an easy way to upgrade to larger servers

Innovative Uses

The simplicity of scaling has made it easy to support gradual growth in traffic with just a few clicks to scale in a new size server and perform a failover swap.
The blue/green deployment was also very simple for upgrading the MySQL version.

Future Planned Uses

It's definitely going to be our main SQL database for the future and we have no plans to shift from it.
I'd like to see cheaper serverless options so that I can prototype new apps without costing a fortune. Right now the serverless is pretty expensive.

Likelihood to Renew

It does the job so I'll keep using it.

Products Replaced

Yes - MYSQL on a standard server. We wanted something managed.

Key Differentiators

Product Usability

We just wanted something with more automation and third party management so we didn't have to do as much work.

Evaluation Lessons Learned

I think Aurora is still good and I wouldn't change it. But if starting again I might take some non-relational parts of the data off and use DynamoDB for them instead. I'd have to investigate how querying it would work if there's no relational mapping though. Maybe MySQL is still best.