Amazon RDS Aurora vs RDS MySQL vs MySQL on EC2?

Question

I've been looking around for best practices when setting up your database on the cloud but it still isn't clear to me which of the following solutions should we be going for?

• Amazon RDS Aurora
• Amazon RDS MySQL
• MySQL on EC2 instances

I see Amazon Aurora being marketed as the better alternative however after some research it doesn't seem like people are using it. Is there a problem with it?

Answer 1

I would suggest RDS over running your own on AWS EC2. Having the failover happen automatically and also the backups are just worth every penny. Especially since RDS isn't that much more expensive.

Aurora looks really good on paper, but the more flexible choice of instances has kept me at PostgreSQL until now. We're looking at migrating to Aurora though, mainly because of the autoscaling storage provisioning and the higher performance.