You can read the blog post that I wrote last year when we announced Aurora to learn more about how it works:
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/highly-scalable-mysql-compa...
Re:Amazon Aurora Now Available
by o_____________o on Tuesday July 28, 2015 @01:05PM
(#9962987)
Do you have any plans for Geo functionality? We're working on a massive project that Aurora sounds perfect for, aside from the apparent lack of that feature.
It seems like MySQL 5.7 will start to have better GIS support. Though that is still a development release at this point. Hopefully if Amazon tries to maintain compatibility, native GIS support may eventually arrive.
This bit caught my attention, does an "Amazon Aurora instance" means one computing instance? Or do they refer to something like your allocated share of the overall Aurora platform? Because if they are able to achieve that performance per-machine, I'm truly amazed.
Their larger instance appears to be "32 vCPUs and 244GiB Memory", that sounds credible to be able to sustain that throughput, particularly if your whole data fits in RAM, but barely. Would be nice to see R/W performance on the smaller instances.