RDS Engines and Aurora

~10 min read

Standard open-source and commercial engines versus AWS's own cloud-native Aurora.

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Key points

  • Standard engines (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server): behave like the real thing, good for lift-and-shift
  • Aurora: MySQL/PostgreSQL-compatible, cloud-native distributed storage, higher throughput, faster failover
  • Aurora Serverless scales compute automatically, including to zero, for variable/intermittent workloads
  • Choose standard engines for exact compatibility needs; Aurora for new builds wanting better cloud-native performance