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Inside AWS Aurora: Key Takeaways from an In-Depth Technical Workshop

From architecture and Serverless v2 to Blue/Green deployments, Zero-ETL, I/O-Optimized storage, and Limitless Database — here’s what stood out and how it applies to real workloads.

In this article
  1. Aurora Architecture
  2. Serverless v2 & Capacity
  3. Query Plan Management
  4. Global Databases
  5. Blue/Green Deployments
  6. Zero-ETL to Redshift
  7. I/O-Optimized
  8. Optimized Reads
  9. Limitless Database & DSQL
1. Understanding Aurora Architecture

Aurora is a cloud-native database that separates compute from storage and replicates data six ways across three Availability Zones. Unlike vanilla PostgreSQL, Aurora avoids full-page writes during checkpoints, significantly reducing I/O and enabling much faster recovery by reconstructing from Amazon S3 in parallel.

Why it matters: You get high durability and fast crash recovery without the operational burden of complex storage tuning.

2. Serverless v2 - Capacity Without the Guesswork
  • On-demand, fine-grained scaling with per-second billing.
  • Auto-pause to zero ACUs for dev/test when connections are idle.
  • Dynamic buffer pool resizing using LFU/LRU eviction.
  • Auto-pause is bypassed when connections remain open, RDS Proxy is used, Global DB is enabled, or logical replication is on.

Tip: For non-prod clusters, set min capacity to 0 ACUs and a short pause timeout to save costs.

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