No, we do not store log or IoT. The data are all business related metrics. I didn't choose aurora but inherited from another team. We have 4 replication reads to scale out the read access. The internal team owns the ingestion (insert) to the write node. All other external accesses are read.

I think the reason behind aurora pick is to support arbitrary aggregation, filtering and low latency read (p90 < 3000ms). We could not pick distributed DB based on Presto, Athena or Redshift mainly for latency requirements.

The other contender I consider is Elastic search. But, I do think using it in this case is akin to fitting a square peg in round hole saying.