Amazon Aurora Overview

Amazon Aurora is a proprietary, high-performance database engine from AWS designed to be fully compatible with Postgres and MySQL. This compatibility allows the use of the same drivers as you would for connecting to Postgres or MySQL databases.

Key Features

• Performance: Aurora offers significant performance improvements over traditional RDS databases—up to 5x better than MySQL RDS and 3x better than Postgres RDS.
• Scalability: Aurora's storage automatically grows from 10GB up to 128TB, with no manual intervention required for disk monitoring or scaling.
• High Availability: With support for up to 15 read replicas and sub-10 ms replication lag, Aurora ensures high availability and quick failover, typically faster than Multi-AZ MySQL RDS failovers.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Although Aurora is about 20% more expensive than traditional RDS, its efficiency and scalability can lead to overall cost savings at scale.
• High Availability & Read Scaling: Aurora stores six copies of your data across three Availability Zones (AZs), requiring only four copies for writes and three for reads to ensure high availability.

Aurora Storage and Replication

• Data Storage: Aurora automatically handles data storage, growing as needed and distributing six copies of your data across three AZs.
• Replication: Features faster replication than MySQL, with typically less than 10ms lag, and supports automatic failover with an average time of less than 30 seconds.

Aurora Clusters

• Write Operations: Aurora clusters have a single master instance for write operations, with automatic failover to a read replica in case of failure.
• Read Operations: Supports up to 15 read replicas for scalability of read operations, with cross-region replication capabilities.
• Endpoints: Provides a writer endpoint for write operations, pointing to the master instance, and a reader endpoint for load-balanced read access to read replicas.

Aurora Features

• Automatic Failover
• Backup and Recovery