What are the differences between Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS?
Both are fully managed relational database services on AWS, but Aurora is a cloud-native engine built for higher performance and availability, while RDS gives you familiar open-source and commercial engines with less operational overhead than self-managed.
Compare side-by-side
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Comparisons
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Amazon RDS
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Amazon Aurora
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Category
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Databases, Relational databases |
Databases, Relational databases |
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Description
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Easy to manage relational databases optimized for total cost of ownership. Supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, and Db2. |
MySQL, PostgreSQL, and DSQL-compatible relational database designed for the cloud. Aurora PostgreSQL and Aurora MySQL are designed to deliver up to 6x the throughput of standard MySQL and PostgreSQL. Aurora DSQL provides serverless distributed SQL with active-active scaling to zero. |
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Best for
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Key features
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Pricing model
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On-Demand, Reserved, or Serverless (pay-per-ACU) |
On-Demand, Reserved, or Serverless |
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Free Tier
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Yes |
Yes — Aurora DSQL and Aurora PostgreSQL |
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Expert take
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RDS removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting of database administration — patching, backups, failover — so your team can focus on schema design and query optimization instead of infrastructure. |
Aurora was designed for the cloud from the storage layer up. The result is MySQL/PostgreSQL/DSQL compatibility designed to deliver up to 6x the throughput, plus features like Global Database, serverless with scale to zero, vector database, and agent memory that simply don't exist in traditional engines. |
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Customer story
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View product page
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How Aurora and RDS compare
Both Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS are fully managed with encryption at rest and in transit, IAM integration, automated backups, Multi-AZ deployments, and read replicas. The features listed in the table above highlight where the services differ.
Aurora and RDS both eliminate the operational burden of running a relational database (patching, backups, failover, scaling). The difference is in how far they go. RDS provides fully managed open source and commercial database engines (MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, Db2) optimized for total cost of ownership. Aurora takes MySQL, PostgreSQL, and DSQL compatibility and re-engineers the underlying storage and replication layers for cloud-native performance and resilience.
Choose Aurora when you need higher throughput (designed for up to 6x MySQL and PostgreSQL), automatic storage scaling to 256 TB, faster failover, cross-Region replication with Global Database, serverless with scale to zero, or capabilities like vector database and agent memory for generative AI workloads. Aurora DSQL adds active-active distributed SQL for global applications.
Choose RDS when you want a fully managed database engine with full compatibility (especially Oracle, SQL Server, or Db2, which Aurora doesn't support), you're running a smaller workload where Aurora's higher baseline cost isn't justified, or you need the broadest ecosystem compatibility with existing tools and ORMs. RDS is also the right starting point if you're unsure where to run; migrations from RDS for MySQL or RDS for PostgreSQL to Aurora are straightforward, when you require cloud-native capabilities.
The migration path is simple: Aurora is wire-compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Moving from RDS for MySQL to Aurora MySQL (or RDS for PostgreSQL to Aurora PostgreSQL) requires minimal application changes; in most cases it's a snapshot restore. This makes RDS a low-risk starting point with Aurora as the natural scale-up path.
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