Amazon Aurora

What is Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora is a relational database engine developed by AWS specifically for cloud operations. It is fully compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL – existing applications, drivers and tools work without modification. The difference lies under the bonnet: Aurora separates computing power and storage and uses a distributed, self-healing storage layer.

This architecture delivers significantly higher performance than traditional engines on comparable hardware, as well as availability that withstands individual hardware failures without any noticeable impact. Aurora is provided as part of Amazon RDS and shares its management model.

How Aurora differs from standard RDS

• Distributed storage: Data is automatically replicated six times across three Availability Zones – with no configuration required.
• Fast failover: In the event of a failure, a replica typically takes over within a few seconds.
• Scalable storage: Storage automatically scales with the data, eliminating the need for manual sizing.
• Read replicas: Up to 15 replicas distribute the read load and share the same storage as the primary instance.

Aurora Serverless

With Aurora Serverless, the database scales automatically with the actual load – capacity increases during peaks and shrinks during quiet periods. For applications with irregular or difficult-to-predict workloads, this can be more cost-effective than a fixed-size instance, as you do not pay for capacity you do not use.

When is Aurora worthwhile?

Aurora is worth it if an application is reaching the performance limits of Standard RDS, if particularly short downtime is required, or if many read operations need to be distributed across replicas. For smaller applications with manageable workloads, Standard RDS with PostgreSQL or MySQL is usually the more cost-effective and entirely sufficient solution.

Aurora for SMEs

Aurora is of interest to SMEs as soon as the database becomes business-critical – for example, behind a web shop or a customer portal with a high access load. The rapid recovery and easy scaling of read accesses then justify the higher price compared to Standard RDS. Because Aurora is MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible, it remains possible to switch between the variants at a later date without having to modify the application.