it's way better than vanilla RDS even without any clustering. it is far more stable under load / near capacity. the storage layer is amazing. people here who are underselling it relative to vanilla RDS simply lack operational experience under load and have a checklist-level understanding

Except... That's not always true. We were told the same, but we found the performance to be underwhelming, at best. Concurrent writes to the same row are orders of magnitude worse, certain read patterns are similarly slow, and you are severely limited in how many transactions you can have before the storage daemon gives up and you end up with double digit write latency for any write.

Yeah, for the most part it's better, but you lose the page cache buffer to stop you from running oom if you miscalculated your shared buffers, your cpu usage will go up significantly and sometimes things will be slower. While on paper the max IOPS are way higher, you do get more IOPS from migrating and then you run into other issues.

If you are or close to the 80k IOPS limit, or 65TB storage limit, there's no alternative, but the "aurora is always faster" line that AWS tries to sell you is bullshit.

thx for the contrary perspective from your experience

+1 Aurora was the secret sauce for us to scale a db-heavy SaaS very quickly with no dedicated ops team. Got us an extra 9 in uptime, too. The cost difference from vanilla RDS was negligible for our revenue model. YMMV, of course on that.