Amazon Aurora Reviews

I am using Amazon Aurora as a relational database. Our applications for our business users are usually relatively internal application types which are mostly small, which makes data storage and retrieval quick and easy, especially when developing business applications where time is of the essence. Therefore, it is preferable to have a technology that allows developers to work quickly and seamlessly, without any complicated setup or extra steps.

When we use NoSQL databases the data comes at a high speed.

The most valuable feature of Amazon Aurora is SQL standardization, it doesn't have its own syntax which is good. It has a lot of hands-off self-management type of activities, such as log rolling and auto-scaling.

There is improvement needed to have more developer focus. Additionally, it would be helpful to have a stand-alone solution outside of Amazon. Amazon has a tendency to favor developing web-based clients, which may not always provide the fastest or most responsive solution as desired.

I have used Amazon Aurora within 12 months.

Amazon Aurora is stable, I have not had an issue with the solution.

The solution is highly scalable, this is the main reason we use it.

There is not any support for the solution. It is self-documenting and self-aware. They provide you with the tool to fix it yourself whenever there is an issue.

The initial setup of Amazon Aurora is one of the better experiences that I have had.

My advice to others who want to use this solution should go through the AWS foundation courses.

I rate Amazon Aurora an eight out of ten.

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.