Amazon Aurora
- What it is
- AWS’s cloud-native relational engine, MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible, offered through Amazon RDS.
- Up to 5× the throughput of MySQL, 3× of PostgreSQL, at roughly 1/10th the cost of commercial databases.
- Why it is different from ordinary RDS engines
- Storage layer is distributed: 6 copies across 3 Availability Zones, self-healing, auto-growing to 128 TB.
- Up to 15 low-latency read replicas with sub-10-millisecond replica lag.
- Fast, continuous backup to S3 with point-in-time recovery, no performance hit.
- Aurora Serverless
- Capacity scales up and down automatically, including to zero. For intermittent or unpredictable workloads.
- Global Database
- Cross-Region replication with typically under 1 second lag, for global reads and Region-level disaster recovery.
- Not to be confused with
- Standard RDS MySQL/PostgreSQL — same API, but conventional single-volume storage and lower performance ceiling.