Item: Amazon Aurora
Rating: 10
Author: Iván García

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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

Return on Investment

We have had zero issues on our site related to database availability since using Aurora
The avilability of our site has been 100% during the last year
No more database administration hassell

Reliability and Availability

Aurora allows you to use one or more Availability Zones (AZ), which you can look as datacenters, so if you deploy an Aurora cluster using two or more different AZs you can have a highly available database. In the cluster you will have a Writer instance and zero or more Reader instances, each Reader can be use to distribute the reader load besides being targets for a fail-over in case of an issue with the Writer node.

Key Insights

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

Other Software Used

Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Amazon Aurora - what an excellent solution for Database problems

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Aurora