What is Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora features a distributed, fault-tolerant, self-healing storage system that auto-scales up to 64TB per database instance. It delivers high performance and availability with up to 15 low-latency read replicas, point-in-time recovery, continuous backup to Amazon S3, and replication across three Availability Zones (AZs).

High Availability

Amazon Aurora is designed to offer greater than 99.99% availability, replicating 6 copies of your data across 3 Availability Zones and backing up your data continuously to Amazon S3. It transparently recovers from physical storage failures; instance failover typically takes less than 30 seconds. You can also backtrack within seconds to a previous point in time, to recover from user errors.

Fully Managed by RDS

Amazon Aurora is fully managed by Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) with hardware provisioning, software patching, setup, configuration, and backups taken care of. Aurora automatically and continuously monitors and backs up your database to Amazon S3, enabling granular point-in-time recovery. You can monitor database performance using Amazon CloudWatch, Enhanced Monitoring, or Performance Insights, an easy-to-use tool that helps you quickly detect performance problems.

Manual Scaling

You can scale instances up or down as your need changes

To scale read capacity and performance, you can add up to 15 low latency read replicas across three Availability Zones. Amazon Aurora automatically grows storage as needed, up to 64TB per database instance.