
Ask HN: Who is using AWS Aurora in production? - netshade
AWS Aurora has been in general release since July 2015. I&#x27;ve been considering using it for a larger project, but casual reading of the AWS forums ( https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forums.aws.amazon.com&#x2F;search.jspa?objID=f60&amp;q=Aurora&amp;x=0&amp;y=0 ) suggest its performance gains are not universal, has high replication lag and is generally unstable for some.<p>I was initially very excited for it based on their AWS deep dive talks, but the AWS forums have tempered my enthusiasm somewhat. Is there anyone here using it in production that would care to share stories of its use, and any pitfalls they encountered?
======
jds86930
We use it in production on some pretty heavy platforms, and we're considering
moving more platforms onto it.

My feedback:

* Read/write performance is as good or better than you will get on any other MySQL platform, and much better in some cases. We didn't really choose Aurora explicitly for it's performance gains so YMMV.

* Replicas had some serious lag issues on earlier versions of Aurora, but they've completely disappeared for us after the 1.6 patch (released in March 2016).

* Peace of mind with replicas is worth a lot. They shouldn't ever fall out of sync with the writer node, they lag less than traditional async MySQL replication (as of the 1.6 patch), & failover to them is pretty fast/easy.

* We had mild stability issues for a while, but those have also largely gone with the 1.6 patch.

* Pitfall: if you're heavy on big temp-tables for on replica nodes, then you might not get great performance on creation & reads from those temp-tables.

* Protip: if you're in a Java-based stack, use the MariaDB JDBC driver (in Aurora mode). This eases farming out queries to replicas, and makes failover a lot easier/quicker.

I'd also say that Aurora isn't a fix for a bad data model and/or lack of
indexes. We've noticed that CPU% is pretty comparible to any other flavor of
MySQL for heavy/complex query workloads.

I recently spoke about Aurora at an AWS Summit. Video here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvMKKDbzaxo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvMKKDbzaxo)

~~~
netshade
Nice, thanks for this!

------
thethimble
We're using Aurora in production at GoGuardian. We've got several instances
performing 100s of millions of writes per day. We've found the performance
gains to be quite staggering - not only higher throughput for reads and writes
but much lower and much more consistent latency for all queries. We've had
some issues with stability, but the performance wins are overwhelmingly worth
it.

Edit: I gave a talk about our use of Aurora at an LA AWS meet up. I'm not sure
if there's a video floating around but here are the slides:
[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10AZU-
knzthpS4i21B10S...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10AZU-
knzthpS4i21B10SO7MGsNxiR3GSibGK4FnRCWM/edit?usp=sharing)

~~~
netshade
Awesome, thanks very much.

