RDS Aurora PostgreSQL

RDS Aurora PostgreSQL Basics

• Amazon’s proprietary fork of PostgreSQL, intended to scale up for high concurrency workloads while maintaining ease of use. Currently based on PostgreSQL 9.6.
• Higher throughput (up to 3x with similar hardware).
• Automatic storage scale in 10GB increments up to 64TB.
• Low latency read replicas that share the storage layer with the master which significantly reduces replica lag.
• Point in time recovery.
• Fast database snapshots.

RDS Aurora PostgreSQL Tips

• Aurora Postgres by default is supposed to utilize high connection rates and for this reason connection pooling must be configured accordingly.
• Because Aurora is based on PostgreSQL 9.6, it lacks features like declarative partitioning or logical replication.

RDS Aurora PostgreSQL Gotchas and Limitations

• Aurora PostgreSQL falls behind normal RDS when it comes to available versions, so if you need features from the latest PostgreSQL version you might be better off with plain RDS.
• Patching and bug fixing is separate from open source PostgreSQL.