What is Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora is a fully managed, high-performance relational database engine built by AWS.

It combines the speed and reliability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open-source databases.

Aurora is compatible with:

• MySQL
• PostgreSQL

It’s part of Amazon RDS, but engineered differently — optimized for performance, scalability, and fault tolerance.

Why Aurora?

Traditional databases are limited by:

• I/O bottlenecks
• Manual scaling
• Slow failover

Aurora solves these problems by decoupling compute and storage layers and automating everything from backups to replication.

Example (kaptaindevops):

kaptaindevops migrates his production MySQL database to Aurora MySQL for better performance, auto-scaling, and fault tolerance without changing his existing application code.

Aurora Architecture Overview

Aurora separates compute and storage:

• Compute Layer: Runs the database engine (MySQL/PostgreSQL-compatible)