My organization uses Amazon Aurora as a database to store customer request information at scale. We also scan the database at a minimum of every 10 minutes to produce telemetry towards insights on customer usage
Pros
Scalability
Availability
Low Latency
Reasonable Cost
Cons
Schema update was challenging, but it is difficult for RDBMS in general
Likelihood to Recommend
reasonable resource for large scale with more defined schema. Users should avoid if your schema updates often
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (Computer Software company, 10,001+ employees)
Amazon Aurora is a relational database service offered by AWS that is designed for high performance, availability, and scalability. It's compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. We use both MySQL and PostgreSQL for our client databases. Depending on our needs.
Pros
High availability.
Compatibility.
High throughput.
Cons
Cost
Complexity
Likelihood to Recommend
For running a high-traffic e-commerce solution that needs to handle a massive stream of user data, products and deal with inventory updates. It works really well and you can easily add replicas to deal with i.e. load balancing.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Information Technology (Computer Software company, 51-200 employees)
A perfect and powerful database management system, I received this application from one of my colleagues, after changing from many DBs like one them is MongoDB. It has a powerful life of taking a huge amounts of data, as for long I have been working with data, I wanted a powerful and well working database system for working efficiently and effectively with my data works, well this application has a cool and powerful chain system for making relationships with various data. I loved it.
Pros
Powerful data handling
Migration facility
Cost effective application
Cons
GUI
Interaction
Likelihood to Recommend
I used many Database management systems , I have even used MySQL, but yeah this is worth of cost and have a good security system, and has a faster deliver speed, which works smoothly and efficiently. Having this I have now stopped looking for other powerful databases, this is a perfect tool for large data handlers.
High Traffic Web Applications:Aurora is an excellent choice for high-traffic web applications that require fast response times and high availability. Its ability to scale both read and write operations makes it a strong contender.
I use it as my company's main Mysql & Postgresql databases for development and productive web environments. For its easy scalability, maintenance and high SLA.
Pros
scalability
maintenance
SLA
Cons
Price
Legacy versions
Compatibility with third party products for replication or backups.
Likelihood to Recommend
Very good for auto-scalable web environments with variable loads. Especially in its Aurora Serverless version. It is more expensive than the normal RDS, but it is worth it for the simplicity of scalability.Aurora Serverless v2 fixes many of the limitations of v1.
VU
Verified User
Technician in Information Technology (Newspapers company, 11-50 employees)
As any company that have to use a database to store information not only for the business data but also for different applications, we decided to use Aurora MySQL to ease the administration and be safe that AWS will handle all patching, updates, backups and maintenance of the database.
Pros
No need to provision storage nor IOPS for the disks
Automatics continuos backups with the possibility to point-in-time restore in new database or backtrack to a point in time in the same database
Increase availability by using Read Replicas and also distributing read capacity using them for queries
Cons
If using Aurora Serverles v2 one thing missing is the possibility to reduce it to 0 ACU
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are in need of an MySQL or PostgreSQL database, forget about using those engines on your own, installing and maintaining them in your own servers. Instead use Aurora MySQL or PostgreSQL compatibility on AWS. You will be free from the heavylifting by allowing RDS to take care of updates, patching, backups and maintenance of the database and servers. You simply will have to connect to the dabase and take care of the data.
We use Aurora MySQL for the database of Magento 2. This handles the load very fine and is has 100% uptime with low resilience and no packet loss. Moreover we use Aurora for scalability from the Read replicas used for read transactions and scaling the database. The restore in time feature also allows us if we need to restore the database for specific time of the day.
Pros
100% Uptime with no packet losses
Scalability with read replicas
fully managed database
Restore Point in Time
Handel more load than mysql
Parallel Queries supported
Cons
Improve Response time
Add write replica for scaling
database caching
Likelihood to Recommend
Online Gaming Platforms
High Traffic Websites - Websites and web applications with heavy traffic loads can benefit from Aurora's scalability and read/write performance, ensuring responsive user experiences even during peak traffic times.
E-Commerce Platforms
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Analytical and Reporting Workloads - Organizations performing complex analytical queries and generating reports from large datasets can benefit from Aurora's performance optimizations and compatibility with popular reporting tools.
My company works on PostgreSQL-related products. With Aurora being so popular, this is something we support through our managed support services. With self-managed EC2, RDS, and Aurora competing for the same space, Aurora is great for large enterprises and most definitely a no-go for startups unless the use case is very specifically defined.
Pros
Fully Managed Database - PostgreSQL.
Scalability
High Availability.
Performant
Cons
Slow in upgrading to minor releases of PostgreSQL.
Aurora releases major versions of PostgreSQL with a massive lag.
Cost is obviously a concern.
Likelihood to Recommend
It really depends on the use case. Do they really like Aurora and all the performance that it brings? Can they legally lag behind release versions by months? Since cost is also a major factor, the recommendation would have to be justified. The benefits are great, in most cases, Aurora isn't needed.
VU
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (201-500 employees)
We use Aurora as the de-facto DBaaS product for hosting our Relational Databases, primarily MySQL. We have over 100 MySQL clusters (Master, Slave) across the microservices and the 5 global regions where Capillary's SaaS products are hosted. Prior to Aurora, all our databases were self-managed and hosted on EC2 instances with EBS volumes, having provisioned IOPS, for storage. As our system scaled, the management of the databases became a full-time job. Also, configuration management, upgrades, and regular maintenance started eating into the team's bandwidth. Furthermore, the chances of human errors and the consequent outages increased with the increase in the number of MySQL set-ups. To address these concerns, in early 2020, we migrated all our MySQL clusters from EC2 to Aurora. The Aurora service hosts over 400 TB of data, and the Aurora instances vary from 4 cores, 32GB RAM to 32 cores, 256 GB RAM configs. The storage layer varies anywhere from 200GB to 30 TB. In a nutshell, all relational, OLTP use-cases for the 700M odd end-consumers touched by Capillary's platform and served out of Aurora.
Pros
Auto-expansion of the disks. The administrators don't have to worry about disk sizes anymore.
Default configuration sets are designed for the majority of the OLTP use-cases. As a developer, I don't have to worry about tuning the MySQL configurations anymore.
Better Performance than MySQL hosted on EC2 instances. The Aurora architecture allows faster replication as well.
Cons
Access to slow query, and error logs is a little cumbersome. Maybe, stream that to an AWS Elasticsearch, and provide searching out of the box (even if it means additional costs).
Upgrade to higher versions of MySQL is a problem.
Failovers to replica, although, they are not needed often, they can be made more seamless.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well Suited: If you have to manage 10 or more MySQL clusters in your environments. Better to use Aurora and configure via a Terraform provider. Don't have to worry about the scalability of your databases. It scaled beautifully with tons of features that make the scaling process easier. Don't have a dedicated infrastructure team. Use the managed service, and let your developers focus on product development.
Less Appropriate: It can be a bit pricey. If you are operating under a budget, this may not be the right tool. RDS is slightly cheaper than Aurora. Configurations and documentation can be confusing at times, but if you have access to the AWS Solution Architects, it gets easier.
