Amazon Aurora provides built-in security, continuous backups, serverless compute, up to 15 read replicas, automated multi-Region replication, and integrations with other AWS services.

Amazon Aurora is a relational database service that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases. Aurora is fully compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, allowing existing applications and tools to run without requiring modification.

Testing on standard benchmarks such as SysBench has shown an increase in throughput of up to 5x over stock MySQL and 3x over stock PostgreSQL on similar hardware. Aurora uses a variety of software and hardware techniques to ensure the database engine is able to fully use available compute, memory, and networking. I/O operations use distributed systems techniques, such as quorums to improve performance consistency.

Multi-AZ deployments with Amazon Aurora Replicas

On instance failure, Aurora uses Amazon RDS Multi-AZ technology to automate failover to one of up to 15 Aurora Replicas you have created in any three Availability Zones. If no Aurora Replicas have been provisioned, in the case of a failure, Amazon RDS will automatically attempt to create a new Aurora DB instance for you. Minimize failover time by replacing community MySQL and PostgreSQL drivers with the open-source and drop-in compatible AWS JDBC Driver for MySQL and AWS JDBC Driver for PostgreSQL. You may also use RDS Proxy to reduce failover times and improve availability. When failovers occur, Amazon RDS Proxy routes requests directly to the new database instance, reducing failover times by up to 66% while preserving application connections.