Amazon Aurora Reviews

We had challenges in loading huge volumes of data quickly, with reports growing beyond a certain number of millions of rows. Despite indexing and applying filters, we experienced significant latency loading the related reports. That's why we looked into using Aurora. We monitored it for about six months and tweaked the database-related parameters, but we still didn't see much improvement. So we reverted to RDS.

We had better control over the parameters that we could tweak in terms of intermediate storage and better indexing capabilities.

It would have been helpful if they had provided some benchmarking numbers. If they had given those, we would have been able to make a more informed decision.

I have been using Amazon Aurora for six months. 

It is a stable solution for a specific business case.

It is a scalable solution. We had around 35 users.

My IT person has been involved in the setup, but they said it was easy.

It is an expensive solution. It is one of the reasons we shifted to RDS. 

I would check you to check your use cases and the pain points you have with the current database and then recommend you make a benchmarking comparison. 

In case of any specific requirements, we can evaluate if Amazon Aurora is a good fit. Overall, I would rate the solution a seven out of ten because our objective was not fulfilled. 

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.

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.