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.

Our deployment was only used within the organization. We didn't make it available publically.

The most valuable feature is the ability to do multiple-read and single-write. These are the kinds of features that we were interested in, and Aurora takes care of that natively.

We tried to set this up ourselves in RDS and although it's more expensive, you don't have to tweak it as much. There is a lot less maintenance involves, which means there is a lot less user input.

Since leaving the previous organization, I have read that they have made Aurora faster. It was about five times quicker than before, which is quite impressive.

I know that because we were using Aurora, we didn't have to use a Redis cache, which saved us some time.

It was easier to use in terms of a technical perspective, we didn't need anyone to figure out how to write, multiple read, and different locations, with a Redis cache on top of that. 

We didn't have to configure it that way; we could have one instance. It was more usable that way.

At the time we were using it, Aurora was supposed to be five times faster, but we didn't see that.

Aurora was supposed to be five times quicker, but we didn't see any evidence. 

As I already stated, since leaving that organization, I was reading an article and noticed that they had enhanced Aurora and that it would be much quicker than before. I haven't tried it myself, but that's what I've heard.

In my experience, I didn't see the claimed speed, and when you factor in the cost, or the extra cost of Aurora compared to a normal database, it didn't justify the cost from a performance standpoint, but it did justify the cost because we didn't have to have multiple instances, Redis caches, and other things like that.

The pricing could improve. It should be reduced.

I have used Amazon Aurora for two or three years.

Amazon Aurora is a stable solution.

I would rate the stability of this solution a ten out of ten.

Amazon Aurora is a scalable product. It is easy to scale.

You don't have to monitor or manage it because it's totally handled by AWS and will scale as your data grows.

We have approximately 600 users in our organization.

We have never contacted or used technical support from Amazon.

We are familiar with AWS. We used EKS to store our keys. We used RDS, Aurora, and Load Balancer. We have used Lambda functions, as well as the container.

The initial setup was easy.

It is quite expensive.

I would rate the pricing a two out of five.

I was responsible for introducing Salesforce to my previous company. 

Salesforce is a CRM tool and is something I am fairly familiar with. Power Apps is something my current employer, evaluating. 

We are not looking; we are a Microsoft partner, and we are interested in how Power Apps may be connected from a consulting standpoint. We are also developing an in-house low-code platform.

We are not getting any traction on that, and wonder if we can compare this to items that are already on the market, should we continue development on this or offer something like Power Apps, OutSystems, or something else to our clients?

I would recommend it for enterprises or corporations, but not for small-scale use.

I would recommend it in situations when stability and speed are important.

For large data sets, not for medium or small data sets or volumes of data If you have a lot of data, you should probably go with Aurora. It is not something I would recommend to anybody else. It is not worth the price.

In my previous company, we had a partnership with Amazon.

I would rate Amazon Aurora a seven 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.

It is the database service where the main application writes its data. Any processing from the front end is typically stored in Aurora unless the data is object-oriented, in which case it is logged into MongoDB.

Aurora is superb compared to other databases. Although our data size is still small, it’s performing well. An important feature is having different replicas for read and write operations, significantly improving performance and ensuring the system remains fast.

It offers features for managing large-scale databases day to day, including backup structures, available snapshots, and replication capabilities. These features ensure that data can be written to different instances across various zones. 

There should be constant changes, which can be challenging to keep up with annually. The UAE evolves rapidly, and after just a two-month break, you might find that things have shifted around. It would be helpful to have a more structured way of introducing these changes. I like how Microsoft does it with Patch, where you know to expect updates regularly. If AWS implemented something similar, the update pattern would be more predictable.

The only database issue we encountered was when we were using a read replica for both read and write operations. This sometimes caused the database to be slow, likely because the read queries weren’t optimized. However, the issue was resolved once we split the read and write operations into separate replicas, and everything has been smooth since then.

I have been using Amazon Aurora for three years since its inception.

I’ve never really had issues with it. It is stable. I rate it a ten out of ten.

100 people are using this solution internally.

AWS operates on a pay-as-you-go model, which means we have some limitations, but it offers significant growth potential. One of the great features of their databases is the ability to increase resources without needing to shut them down.

I’ve logged a few tickets, though not specifically for RDS. The issue I had was with billing, but I received good support and helpful advice, which allowed me to resolve the issue and move forward.

The initial setup is straightforward. I’ve deployed it on my free account; it’s just a few clicks, and the database runs.

It has monthly billing.

Aurora is a great product. Since it’s an open-source solution, it’s not as expensive to license as other enterprise-grade databases. I highly recommend it.

Overall, I rate the solution as ten out of ten.