Item: Amazon Aurora
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Amazon Aurora comes with an easy to use and intuitive workflow. Our business started using Amazon Aurora to handle vast websites with huge content and file systems. We nearly have 500+ websites and all of them use Amazon Aurora. As far as I know, everything has been seamless until now. Of course there were hiccups in the between with some outages but were handled by Amazon Aurora support very well.

Pros and Cons

Concurrency
Excellent transaction time
Perfect compatibility with our sites
Ease of scaling

Little less transparent on insights
Non-availability of standalone solutions. I understand amazon aims for cloud based solution. But having a facility with standalone will look great
Lastly, of course pricing could be more dynamic so we can only pay for what we opt for

Return on Investment

Improvement in website transaction time
Better concurrency which allowed more traffic simultaneously
Little bit on the costly side but I guess can be managed by the roi

Reliability and Availability

In my experience, Amazon Aurora is excellent in automated backups, security, encryption and somewhat in monitoring. Availability wise as Amazon Aurora automatically defines clusters and backups we don't have to manage it as much as we did traditional database system we use for some of our sites in Acquia. We even use Platform.sh for some of our sites but I think it pales in comparison with Amazon Aurora.

Alternatives Considered

Acquia Digital Experience Platform

Both Acquia Digital Experience Platform and Amazon Aurora use MySQL and PostgreSQL. Acquia of course has more compatibility with other database system like MariaDB. But Amazon Aurora provides maximum 100GB for a single subscription and in subscription we can have multiple sites. Whereas Amazon Aurora starts off with 10GB and can be upscaled up to 128TB without our intervention. And I guess I won't be needing to mention on availability and durability as mentioned in other sections.

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

Acquia Digital Experience Platform, Postman, Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Likelihood to Recommend

We have around 500+ websites in which we are using Amazon Aurora. Most of them are huge in terms of content and transactions per minute that the databases handle. In my opinion, database encryption is well defined. It automatically upsizes, upscales the clusters that it provides per database.
Once we had an outage for around 30hours. We have one website which sends around 1.5k files at a time monthly to another vendor using the database. We had an outage once and had a backlog of around 12k files not being sent to our other vendor. But, support team was readily available in shifts the whole time, they passed on notes of what and how much work is done to their colleagues and resolved the issue within 30hours (which would have easily taken 4-5 working days to understand) for us.

Great, intuitive and a must have with larger businesses

Overall Satisfaction with Amazon Aurora