AWS Aurora vs. AWS RDS MySQL Checklist

To get familiar with AWS Aurora, take a look at the recent AWS April 2016 Webinar Series – Migrating your Databases to Aurora and the June 2016 Webinar Series – Amazon Aurora Deep Dive – Optimizing Database Performance session lead by Puneet Agarwal.

Here are the top reasons why I would choose AWS Aurora over AWS RDS MySQL

1. 1. Faster recovery from instance failure (5x times or more vs. MySQL)
   2. Consistent lower impact on the Primary replica
   3. Needs additional throughput (theoretically 5x times for the same resources vs. MySQL). This was achieved by decoupling the cache and storage sub-systems and spreading them across many nodes as well as performing log commit first while DB manipulation is done asynchronously.
   4. Uses or can migrate to MySQL 5.6
   5. Comfortable with the Aurora I/O mechanism (16K for read, 4K for write, all can be batched if smaller)
   6. Gets more replicas (maximum of 15 vs. 5 in MySQL)
   7. Prioritizes recovery replica targets and sets replicas with different size than the master
   8. Needs virtually no replication lag – since replica nodes share the same storage as the master uses
   9. Able to decide about encryption at rest, at DB creation
   10. Accepts working with the InnoDB engine alone
   11. Eliminates the need for cache warming
   12. Only an additional 20% pricing increase over MySQL to gain all the benefits above