Amazon Aurora
Ranked 6 of 15 managed databases by recommenders
Managed relational database that handles storage, replication and failover, so teams skip most admin work. Critics say costs run high and are hard to predict.
Managed relational database that handles storage, replication and failover, so teams skip most admin work. Critics say costs run high and are hard to predict.
54 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 23
- criticize it
- 31
- approval share
- 43%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 23 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 0.7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Little operational work for teams
“You lean heavily on managed services (Aurora Serverless, Kinesis, Step Functions) where the operational load is the value prop.”
Comment from 12 Nov 2025 on Hacker News “Running all your postgres on ec2 is like 1000X harder than looking at the dashboard for an Aurora cluster.”
Comment from 7 Jan 2026 in “Netflix Migrates to Amazon Aurora: 75% Performance Boost and 28% Cost Reduction” “The experience of Aurora is I can have all of that , in like 30 lines of terraform and a few minutes.”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “Don't rent the cloud, own instead” - Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars”
- Comment from 17 Jun 2026 in “Hetzner increased dedicated server prices 3-4x”
- Comment from 15 Dec 2025 in “$50 PlanetScale Metal Is GA for Postgres”
Storage layer handles replication and durability
“bulk data loads are available on replicas a lot sooner on Aurora because the storage is the replication system, not the WAL”
Comment from 20 Dec 2025 in “Go ahead, self-host Postgres” “you are comparing systems that are already redundant and highly available (e.g. Aurora, writing six copies of the data)”
Comment from 20 Jun 2026 in “PostgresBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Postgres Services” “Their storage layer worked perfectly and prevented the ACID violations.”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “A race condition in Aurora RDS” - Comment from 10 Jul 2026 in “Postgres locks do not scale”
Robust and reliable in production
“we've been running multiple aurora clusters in production for years now and have not encountered this issue with failovers”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “A race condition in Aurora RDS” “genuinely one of the most robust solutions out there in that space”
Comment from 5 Feb 2026 in “Don't rent the cloud, own instead” “It has been very robust for us.”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “A race condition in Aurora RDS” Fast on write-heavy workloads
“Aurora is faster than MySQL on equivalent hardware, especially for write-heavy workloads, just that the “5× faster” claim only holds under very specific benchmark conditions.”
Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “A $1k AWS mistake” “delivers significantly higher performance for the same underlying hardware”
Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “A $1k AWS mistake” “Aurora is fast enough that we actual started to contend on the heap locks”
Comment from 7 Jan 2026 in “Netflix Migrates to Amazon Aurora: 75% Performance Boost and 28% Cost Reduction”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Expensive, hard-to-predict I/O costs
“What if we made people pay for storage and I/O? And we made estimating I/O practically impossible?”
Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “A $1k AWS mistake” “We were burned by Aurora. Costs, performance, latency, all were poor and affected our product.”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “A race condition in Aurora RDS” “More often than not there's a single pg aurora instance responsible for 50%+ of the bill.”
Comment from 20 Aug 2026 in “PostgreSQL for Everything” - Comment from 3 Feb 2026 in “Bunny Database”
- Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars”
Failover behaves unexpectedly at times
“My cluster recently started to failover every few days whenever it experiences the load to trigger scale up”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “A race condition in Aurora RDS” “What's particularly concerning is that this seems to be a fundamental flaw in Aurora's failover mechanism”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “A race condition in Aurora RDS” “indicates something wrong with how they propagate DNS changes during the failover”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “A race condition in Aurora RDS” Docs and behavior often surprise users
“its not the first time I have noticed unexpected and odd behaviors from Aurora PostgreSQL offering”
Comment from 15 Nov 2025 in “A race condition in Aurora RDS” “Their docs are not good and things frequently don't behave how you expect them to.”
Comment from 14 Nov 2025 in “A race condition in Aurora RDS” Benchmarks overstate speed versus bare metal
“Aurora is faster than MySQL on equivalent hardware, especially for write-heavy workloads, just that the “5× faster” claim only holds under very specific benchmark conditions.”
Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “A $1k AWS mistake” “I don't think that these numbers stand if you compare with a PostgreSQL on a bare metal server with NVMe SSDs attached to it.”
Comment from 7 Jan 2026 in “Netflix Migrates to Amazon Aurora: 75% Performance Boost and 28% Cost Reduction” “you are comparing systems that are already redundant and highly available (e.g. Aurora, writing six copies of the data)”
Comment from 20 Jun 2026 in “PostgresBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Postgres Services”
Other managed databases people recommend
The four most recommended other managed databases, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon RDS | 50 | 43 | 54% | 11 | — | — |
| Neon Postgres | 48 | 10 | 83% | 12 | — | Approved |
| DynamoDB | 46 | 31 | 60% | 11 | — | — |
| Cloudflare D1 | 36 | 30 | 55% | 10 | — | — |
| Amazon AuroraThis page | 23 | 31 | 43% | 8 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 67 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“More often than not there's a single pg aurora instance responsible for 50%+ of the bill.”
“Sounds like they could have benefitted from Aurora's storage model”
“you are comparing systems that are already redundant and highly available (e.g. Aurora, writing six copies of the data)”
“Upgrading an Aurora Postgres server is like two clicks on the Web UI”
“The S3s and Auroras of the world are expensive for a reason”
“In the absolute worst case, one would have to use a distributed cloud database, e.g. AWS Aurora or AWS DynamoDB”
“The tradeoff of doing aggregations and joins in memory just isn't worth it.”
“getting rid of this cliff for most workloads”
“The experience of Aurora is I can have all of that , in like 30 lines of terraform and a few minutes.”
“genuinely one of the most robust solutions out there in that space”
“nothing comes close to Aurora functionality”
“AWS with Aurora is more expensive for sure and isn't edge located if I recall correctly”
“Running all your postgres on ec2 is like 1000X harder than looking at the dashboard for an Aurora cluster.”
“I don't think that these numbers stand if you compare with a PostgreSQL on a bare metal server with NVMe SSDs attached to it.”
“Aurora is fast enough that we actual started to contend on the heap locks”
“It only scales down after a period of inactivity though - it's not pay-per-request like other serverless offerings.”
“cost almost nothing for low traffic and is vastly superior to self hosting”
“bulk data loads are available on replicas a lot sooner on Aurora because the storage is the replication system, not the WAL”
“Of course, it'll cost more in real money whether or not it performs better”
“offer those properties without any additional setup”
“Aurora has some advantages if you're not a DB expert”
“Aurora is faster than MySQL on equivalent hardware, especially for write-heavy workloads, just that the “5× faster” claim only holds under very specific benchmark conditions.”
“with Aurora Serverless with variable and unpredictable workloads you could have important cost savings”
“delivers significantly higher performance for the same underlying hardware”
“What if we made people pay for storage and I/O? And we made estimating I/O practically impossible?”
“Aurora (with ability to handle big spikes) helped us a lot”
“its not the first time I have noticed unexpected and odd behaviors from Aurora PostgreSQL offering”
“My cluster recently started to failover every few days whenever it experiences the load to trigger scale up”
“Sounds like you need to use IO optimized storage billing mode.”
“they made sure that it guaranteed correctness for exclusive writer access”
“Their storage layer worked perfectly and prevented the ACID violations.”
“We were burned by Aurora. Costs, performance, latency, all were poor and affected our product.”
“It has been very robust for us.”
“you pay for cluster storage instead of per-instance storage”
“we've been running multiple aurora clusters in production for years now and have not encountered this issue with failovers”
“Their docs are not good and things frequently don't behave how you expect them to.”
“What's particularly concerning is that this seems to be a fundamental flaw in Aurora's failover mechanism”
“indicates something wrong with how they propagate DNS changes during the failover”
“You lean heavily on managed services (Aurora Serverless, Kinesis, Step Functions) where the operational load is the value prop.”
“On AWS an Aurora RDS is not cheap. But I don't have to spend time or money on an admin.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.