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Amazon Aurora vs Amazon RDS comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
5.6
Switching to Amazon Aurora saves costs nearly 30% over RDS while improving performance, reliability, and manpower efficiency by 50%.
Sentiment score
2.6
Organizations benefit financially from Amazon RDS's cost-effectiveness, agility, and scalability, despite varying results and AWS expense concerns.
Using Amazon Aurora has saved us significantly in terms of manpower costs, with nearly fifty percent savings compared to an on-premises solution.
Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.3
Amazon Aurora offers varying support quality; enterprise users get prompt help, while free trial users experience limited assistance.
Sentiment score
6.8
Amazon RDS support varies by level and location; premium is efficient, but US standard support often lacks expertise.
Technical support from Amazon is rated very highly.
Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA
The initial support could improve by having engineers familiarize themselves with the issue content to provide more specialized assistance from the start.
Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay
The documentation is quite good.
Corporate Database Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
The official AWS technical support for Amazon RDS is helpful, providing 24/7 assistance for all business support cases with tools such as the health dashboard and AWS trusted advisor.
AWS Architect at Virtual University
I would rate the support from AWS very high, maybe nine, but it also depends on what kind of support you have signed in your contract, whether the premium support or the standard support.
Director Software Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon Aurora excels in scalability, seamlessly auto-scaling for dynamic environments, though AWS's pricing model has limitations.
Sentiment score
7.1
Amazon RDS is praised for its scalability and reliability, though some express minor concerns with large dataset management.
This scalability is critical as it allows for runtime expansion, which is essential for businesses moving from on-premises to the cloud.
Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay
Its automated scaling, both in storage and instances, is vital as it eliminates manual interventions.
AICE Graduate at alx_africa
The installation of Amazon RDS is quite easy and quite scalable.
Director Software Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Despite being a strong feature, scalability could be improved due to the lack of full functionality in autoscaling.
VP engineering at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
Amazon Aurora is stable with occasional minor issues, offering high availability and reliability for MySQL and PostgreSQL engines.
Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon RDS is praised for reliability, performance, and uptime with minimal issues, especially with Multi-AZ enhancing stability.
It offers a stable environment, ensuring consistent performance.
Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay
Amazon RDS is very stable when deployed correctly across different zones with the right configurations.
AICE Graduate at alx_africa
It is a stable product overall, with very few issues.
VP engineering at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Amazon RDS is quite stable, and the SLAs are sort of 99.98%.
Director Software Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
 

Room For Improvement

Amazon Aurora users seek better pricing, expanded support, smoother migrations, and improvements in performance, scalability, and developer resources.
Amazon RDS users seek improvements in security, documentation, scalability, integration, and support, with enhanced customization and cost reduction.
There are technical challenges, such as the inability to provision the database using a PostgreSQL snapshot directly.
Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA
Keeping extensions up-to-date with PostgreSQL releases would enhance Aurora's functionality.
Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay
I used the backup options in Amazon Aurora for cloning databases. It's very common.
Data & Solution Archtect at Enkel
Simplifying migration for those transitioning from on-premises to cloud environments.
AICE Graduate at alx_africa
Having native Change Data Capture (CDC) support would be beneficial, allowing for seamless integration with Kafka without relying on external technologies like Debezium.
VP engineering at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Enabling performance insights to view query formats where the bottlenecks occur, identifying the fixes, slow queries, and missing indexes.
AWS Architect at Virtual University
 

Setup Cost

Amazon Aurora provides flexible, cost-effective pricing with notable performance benefits, though some consider it expensive compared to self-managed solutions.
Amazon RDS pricing is usage-dependent and cost-effective, offering savings on admin costs but can be expensive compared to alternatives.
The pricing is reasonable and not overly expensive.
Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA
Amazon Aurora is not very expensive as other solutions with similar features from other vendors come at almost the same cost.
Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay
The pricing for Amazon Aurora is different from DocumentDB because DocumentDB is cheaper.
Data & Solution Archtect at Enkel
While Azure provides great services, long-term plans on AWS are 20% to 30% cheaper.
AWS Engineer at Neurolov.ai
I find the pricing of Amazon RDS fair, as AWS operates on a pay-for-what-you-use model.
AICE Graduate at alx_africa
I rate the price for Amazon as eight on a scale from one to ten.
Corporate Database Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
 

Valuable Features

Amazon Aurora offers automated maintenance, high scalability, and compatibility, ideal for diverse databases and efficient FinOps management.
Amazon RDS provides scalability, security, and flexibility with multi-engine support and simplified operations for diverse applications.
Amazon Aurora offers a 99.9% SLA compared to PostgreSQL. This ensures a high level of availability for our applications.
Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA
It replicates data across multiple Availability Zones, ensuring high availability and geographical redundancy, which can be considered a GR instead of a DR.
Associate Vice President - Database Management (Principal Solutions Architect) at Northbay
Amazon RDS provides data encryption using services like KMS, crucial for securing high-sensitive data and meeting compliance requirements such as HIPAA or PCI DSS.
AICE Graduate at alx_africa
Database management is effective in Amazon RDS because it offers automated backups, high availability, read replicas, and support from multiple database engineers, while also providing security, monitoring and metrics, scalability.
AWS Architect at Virtual University
In some cases, we are using the read replica feature, and it does improve our application performance because we do not allow any downstream system to come to the main storage or main databases and perform a query.
Director Software Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Aurora
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (8th), Database Management Systems (DBMS) (5th)
Amazon RDS
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
58
Ranking in other categories
Database as a Service (DBaaS) (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

SP
Digital Services & Engagement Senior Manager at AXA
High availability and operational efficiency achieved with reliable managed services
We have primarily used Amazon Aurora for handling our databases. We migrated from PostgreSQL to Amazon Aurora about a year ago. It serves as a customized PostgreSQL database that we utilize Amazon Aurora offers a 99.9% SLA compared to PostgreSQL. This ensures a high level of availability for our…
reviewer2592669 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Software Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Positive experiences with database services, with minor room for feature enhancements observed
I don't really see any disadvantages of Amazon RDS. With Oracle, I think AWS doesn't provide the RAC stability. If you have Oracle installed in your own data centers, you can set up various clusters and we can set up the RACs, but in Amazon RDS, we cannot have the RAC feature of Oracle. They could add that feature. Amazon RDS has limitations regarding RAC. If we talk about installing Oracle in RDS, we cannot have the RAC, but if you deploy Oracle on GCP, then there is probably the RAC feature available. I observed that around two or three years back, but I'm not sure whether they have added the RAC feature in AWS. Amazon RDS is expensive compared to GCP. GCP also has the same features, and although it is quite extensive and feature-rich, I see Amazon RDS as slightly expensive compared to other clouds.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
7%
University
6%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
11%
University
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise15
Large Enterprise23
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Aurora?
Aurora's compatibility with MySQL or PostgreSQL benefited our database management. The migration from on-premise MySQL to Aurora was similar, so we didn't need to change our source code.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Aurora?
The pricing for Amazon Aurora is different from DocumentDB because DocumentDB is cheaper. However, when you manage the administration more closely, you can control costs better with Amazon Aurora. ...
What needs improvement with Amazon Aurora?
I would like to see some tutorials from Amazon for Aurora because I'm too new to it. I believe Amazon can make more tutorials for the product since there's a lot of reading required, and a short tu...
What do you like most about Amazon RDS?
The product's installation phase is easy.
What needs improvement with Amazon RDS?
I don't really see any disadvantages of Amazon RDS. With Oracle, I think AWS doesn't provide the RAC stability. If you have Oracle installed in your own data centers, you can set up various cluster...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
RDS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dow Jones, Arizona State University, Verizon, Capital One, United Nations, Nielsen, Autodesk, Fanduel
Edmodo
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