Amazon Aurora is a relation database built on top of a Postgre or MySQL engine.
These days, we are mostly developing small microservices, and we consider Aurora if we want to have a scalable database. It can have a higher number of read replicas. In those instances, we recommend Aurora. With one or two projects, we have used Aurora.
The solution is deployed on their managed service on the cloud.
The most valuable feature is that the maintainability is offloaded to the service provider. I don't have to maintain a database or do any administrative tasks, which comes in handy. The solution also comes with disaster recovery feasibility, where I can switch to another zone. The data between these tools and zones is replicated easily. Another valuable feature is the replicas. I don't have to worry about synchronizing the data between multiple instances, so it takes care of all these maintenance activities by itself.
Their serverless feature is also quite good.
It is a bit costly. The features are quite good, and I wouldn't say it requires any technical improvements. But from a cost perspective, some clients wouldn't go for Aurora because of that.
Right now, I think it has only two flavors: MySQL and Postgre. I would like Aurora to be integrated with the Oracle engine because most clients have Oracle databases, especially the CRM ones. I have seen that they're mostly into Oracle databases. Of course, we can migrate the data, but if they have a similar engine or an Oracle engine, that would also be helpful.
I have worked with Aurora within the last few months.
It's stable. I've never had any downtimes.
The solution is highly scalable.
Technical support is good, but we have to be on the business profile. Mostly, they come up with the business subscription or the enterprise subscription. So, we usually get to raise calls and they are very quick in assisting. That's all fine.
But the caveat comes when you are not on a business profile. For example, when I'm working with the pre-sales team, I don't have a business subscription. I'm just a free trial user where I'm trying to evaluate a product. In that case, you don't get their support.
The free version is fine, but there is limited support for people who are doing the POCs or evaluating a particular product before engagement itself. Having more technical support in that case could be helpful. At least, if they're providing a $200 free credit, maybe they could also provide 10 queries. For instance, if I have 10 challenges which I'm not able to solve by myself with their documentation, or five cases that I could raise with them and they would provide service, even if I'm not paying the subscription, that would help.
Setup is very straightforward.
We don't have any maintenance guy at all because the maintenance is offloaded to Amazon. I don't have a DB guy within my team who is doing maintenance. The developer who does the coding for the application development simply takes care of provisioning the Aurora database as well.
The price could be lower compared to its competitors.
I would rate this solution 9 out of 10.
For Postgre and MySQL, it is all quite good. However, it is a bit costlier. Given the features they have provided, it's okay, but for the smaller clients, they feel it is a bit too costly.
