Amazon Aurora
What is Amazon Aurora?
- Fully managed, high-performance relational database by AWS
- Compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL
- Built for speed, availability, and durability
- Part of the Amazon RDS family but optimized under the hood
Performance
- Up to 5x faster than MySQL
- Up to 3x faster than PostgreSQL
Aurora MySQL offers:
- Up to five times the throughput of MySQL Community Edition
- Up to 128 TB of autoscaling SSD storage
- Six-way replication across three Availability Zones
- Up to 15 read replicas with replica lag under 10-ms
- Automatic monitoring with failover
Key Features
Storage & Performance
- SSD-backed storage that auto-scales from 10GB to 128TB
- Uses quorum-based replication across 3 AZs (6 copies of data)
- Automatic failover in under 30 seconds ✔
Replicas
- Supports up to 15 Aurora read Replicas
- Shared storage, so no replication lag
- Auto failover to replicas if writer fails
Backups
- Continuous backups to Amazon S3
- No impact on performance
- Point-in-time recovery supported ✔
Aurora Global Databases
- Designed for low-latency global reads
- Supports up to 5 secondary regions
- <1s replication lag
- Use for disaster recovery & global apps
- 📌 Use Global Aurora for multi-region, mission-critical workloads
Aurora Serverless v2
- Auto-scales compute in fine-grained increments
- Ideal for variable or unpredictable workloads
- Pay-per-second billing model
- Maintains warm pools for near-instant scaling
- 💡 Great for dev/test, infrequent workloads, or new applications
Security
- Encryption at rest via AWS KMS
- Encryption in transit via TLS
- Supports IAM authentication
Monitoring & Integration
- Works with:
- Amazon CloudWatch (metrics/logs)
- AWS CloudTrail (auditing)
- RDS Performance Insights
- 📌 Fully integrated with AWS ecosystem
Pricing
- Aurora (Provisioned): Pay per instance hour
- Aurora Serverless: Pay per second for active compute
- Backup storage & IO operations billed separately
- 💡 Stop unused instances to reduce costs
Exam Tips & Best Practices
- ✔ Aurora is proprietary, not open-source
- ✔ Use Aurora Serverless v2 for on/off workloads
- ✔ Use Aurora Global for multi-region disaster recovery
- ✔ Aurora replicas are faster and cheaper than standard RDS
- ✔ Aurora maintains high durability via multi-AZ replication
Less than 1 sec to do cross region replication
