# Amazon Aurora

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/databases/amazon-aurora/

AWS relational database engine compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, built on a shared cluster volume with copy-on-write cloning and a serverless capacity mode.

## Who it suits

Teams on AWS who want a Postgres or MySQL cluster that can throw off a copy-on-write clone of production in minutes, keep up to fifteen readers behind it, and pause to nothing between bursts in serverless mode.

Consider something else if You want the upstream database rather than a compatible one, or a branch workflow rather than a clone. AWS documents cloning as a way to build a test environment, not as something you do per pull request.

## iScore

68 / 100 (80% interval 62–73), rank 8 of 14 in databases — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Read this score with care:
- Capacity and limits is thin: 2 of 7 criteria are scored, so it sits near the category middle with a wide interval (41–54). Read the interval, not the point.
- Adoption is thin: 0 of 1 criteria are scored, so it sits near the category middle with a wide interval (8–99). Read the interval, not the point.
- Documented but not scored, because the page states it as text with no comparable number or a yes/limited/no (a one-time, usage-based or other-vendor price, or a per-site choice): minimum_paid_price, backup_retention, entry_plan_memory, entry_plan_storage, max_connections, pitr_window, read_replicas. Read them on the provider page; the score neither rewards nor penalises what it could not compare.

Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every databases peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/databases/amazon-aurora/alternatives/

- Price: 63 (51–75), weight 25%, 3 of 6 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: egress_overage_price, free_card_required, minimum_paid_price
- Capacity and limits: 47 (41–54), weight 20%, 2 of 7 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: backup_retention, entry_plan_memory, entry_plan_storage, max_connections, pitr_window
- Capabilities: 75 (69–81), weight 20%, 4 of 5 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: read_replicas
- Trust and compliance: 81 (75–87), weight 15%, 11 of 13 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: audit_logs, support_included
- Evidence: 100 (100–100), weight 10%, 4 of 4 criteria scored
- Adoption: 53 (8–99), weight 10%, 0 of 1 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: No — capped Free plan plus time-limited credits ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/), read 2026-09-09)
- Kind of free offer: Introductory free tier ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/free/), read 2026-09-13)
- When the free offer ends: 6 months after the account is opened, or when the credits run out — whichever comes first. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/free/), read 2026-09-13)
- Entry paid plan: No plan fee and no minimum commitment — Aurora charges for what you use. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard in US East (N. Virginia), and the smallest capacity you can set is 0.5 ACUs; storage and I/O are billed separately. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/), read 2026-09-13)
- Pricing model: Pay per use with no plan fee: instances plus storage plus I/O, or ACU-hours in serverless mode. AWS's own worked example prices serverless compute at $0.12 per ACU-hour on Aurora Standard and $0.156 on Aurora I/O-Optimized in US East (N. Virginia) — the difference being whether I/O is metered separately or folded into a higher compute and storage rate. Provisioned instances also offer Reserved Instance pricing, and usage may qualify for Database Savings Plans against a committed hourly spend. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/), read 2026-09-09)

### Limits

- Storage (entry plan): No included allowance on the pay-as-you-go Paid plan: storage scales automatically up to 256 TiB and is metered per GB-month — $0.10 per GB-month for Aurora Standard in AWS's US East (N. Virginia) example. The AWS Free Tier Free plan caps a cluster at 1 GiB. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/), read 2026-09-13)
- Memory (entry plan): No plan tiers: memory comes with the Aurora Capacity Unit, and AWS states 1 ACU has approximately 2 GiB of memory. The smallest capacity you can set is 0.5 ACUs; the AWS Free Tier Free plan caps a cluster at 4 ACUs and the Paid plan at 256. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing/), read 2026-09-13)

### Execution

- Managed connection pooling: Supported — through Amazon RDS Proxy, a separate feature of the service ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/rds-proxy.html), read 2026-09-13)

### Infrastructure

- Scales to zero: Supported — serverless capacity mode only ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/aurora-serverless-v2-administration.html), read 2026-09-09)
- Regions: 34 AWS regions, the same list for the MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible editions. Counted from the two availability tables in Aurora's own docs, which publish the regions and no total. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Concepts.RegionsAndAvailabilityZones.html), read 2026-09-09)
- Uptime SLA: 99.99% for a cluster deployed across two or more Availability Zones; 99.9% for a single-AZ cluster. Both are service-credit thresholds. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/sla/), read 2026-09-14)

### Data

- Engine: MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible. Aurora is AWS's own engine rather than a hosted build of either, so compatibility is the claim being made — existing code, tools and applications are stated to work, which is not the same as being the upstream database. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/CHAP_AuroraOverview.html), read 2026-09-09)
- Connection limit: Derived from memory, not set per plan. On Aurora serverless the default follows the maximum ACU setting — 90 connections on MySQL and 189 on PostgreSQL at 1 ACU, 135/823 at 4 ACUs, 1,000/1,669 at 8 ACUs — and a minimum capacity of 0 or 0.5 ACUs caps PostgreSQL at 2,000. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/aurora-serverless-v2.setting-capacity.html), read 2026-09-13)
- When idle: Pauses only in serverless mode with minimum capacity set to zero ACUs: the instance auto-pauses after an idle interval you choose — 300 seconds (five minutes) by default and at minimum, up to 86,400 seconds (one day) — and resumes automatically when a connection request arrives. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/aurora-serverless-v2-auto-pause.html), read 2026-09-13)
- Database branching: Limited — clones, not a branch workflow ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Aurora.Managing.Clone.html), read 2026-09-09)
- Point-in-time recovery: Any point inside the backup retention period, so up to 35 days. Aurora's backups are continuous and incremental against the cluster volume rather than periodic snapshots plus log replay, which is why AWS states no performance impact while they are taken. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Aurora.Managing.Backups.html), read 2026-09-09)
- Read replicas: Supported — 15 per cluster, a quota AWS will not raise ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_Limits.html), read 2026-09-09)
- Backup retention: 1 to 35 days. Unlike an RDS DB instance it cannot be set to 0 — Aurora backs the cluster volume up continuously and there is no way to turn that off. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Aurora.Managing.Backups.html), read 2026-09-09)
- Rewind in place: Limited — Aurora MySQL edition only ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/AuroraMySQL.Managing.Backtrack.html), read 2026-09-09)

### Compliance

- SOC 2: Assessed by third-party auditors under multiple AWS compliance programs, SOC among them; the docs name SOC, not SOC 2. Reports download via AWS Artifact. AWS names the SOC program, not a SOC 2 type. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/RDS-compliance.html), read 2026-09-13)
- ISO 27001: Covered under AWS's account-wide ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification — not scoped per-service the way SOC, HIPAA and PCI DSS are on AWS's own site. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/iso-27001-faqs/), read 2026-09-12)
- HIPAA: Listed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/hipaa-eligible-services-reference/), read 2026-09-13)
- GDPR / data residency: AWS customers can process personal data on all AWS services in compliance with GDPR, and choose the storage type and geographic region for their data. ([source](https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/gdpr-center/), read 2026-09-12)
- PCI DSS: Assessed by third-party auditors under multiple AWS compliance programs, PCI among them; no level or version named. Reports download via AWS Artifact. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/RDS-compliance.html), read 2026-09-13)
- Encryption at rest: On by default: all new database clusters created on or after February 18, 2026 are encrypted at rest with AES-256 under an AWS KMS key. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Overview.Encryption.html), read 2026-09-13)
- Customer-managed keys: Three KMS key types: an AWS owned key by default, an AWS managed key, or a customer managed key stored in your account that you own and fully control. AWS KMS charges apply for a customer managed key. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/Overview.Encryption.html), read 2026-09-13)
- Role-based access control: IAM identity-based policies and roles govern who may act on Aurora resources, and IAM database authentication can be used to sign in to the DB cluster. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/UsingWithRDS.IAM.html), read 2026-09-13)
- Private networking / VPC: Clusters sit behind security groups with network access off by default; a non-public instance is reachable over Site-to-Site VPN or Direct Connect. DB clusters launch into a VPC at no additional cost. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/infrastructure-security.html), read 2026-09-13)
- Dedicated infrastructure: With dedicated VPC tenancy an Aurora DB cluster runs on dedicated hardware; all Aurora PostgreSQL instance classes except burstable db.t3/db.t4g support it. ([source](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/AuroraPostgreSQL.Security.html), read 2026-09-13)

## Compared with

- [Amazon Aurora vs Neon](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-aurora-vs-neon/)
- [Amazon Aurora vs Supabase](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-aurora-vs-supabase/)
- [Amazon Aurora vs Amazon RDS](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-rds-vs-amazon-aurora/)
- [Amazon Aurora vs Aiven](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aiven-vs-amazon-aurora/)
- [Amazon Aurora vs Crunchy Bridge](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-aurora-vs-crunchy-bridge/)
- [Amazon Aurora vs Neo4j](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-aurora-vs-neo4j/)
- [Amazon Aurora vs Nile](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-aurora-vs-nile/)
- [Amazon Aurora vs PlanetScale](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-aurora-vs-planetscale/)
- [Amazon Aurora vs Prisma Postgres](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-aurora-vs-prisma-postgres/)
- [Amazon Aurora vs ScaleGrid](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-aurora-vs-scalegrid/)
- [Amazon Aurora vs TigerData](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-aurora-vs-tigerdata/)
- [Amazon Aurora vs Turso](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-aurora-vs-turso/)