No need for multi AZ. Faster, more cost effective. Downtime of less than a minute in the event of a crash. Geographically distributed storage that autoscales up to 64TB.
"Q: How does Aurora improve recovery time after a database crash?
Unlike other databases, after a database crash Amazon Aurora does not need to replay the redo log from the last database checkpoint (typically 5 minutes) and confirm that all changes have been applied, before making the database available for operations. This reduces database restart times to less than 60 seconds in most cases. Amazon Aurora moves the buffer cache out of the database process and makes it available immediately at restart time. This prevents you from having to throttle access until the cache is repopulated to avoid brownouts."
Q: What happens during failover and how long does it take?
Failover is automatically handled by Amazon Aurora so that your applications can resume database operations as quickly as possible without manual administrative intervention.
If you have an Amazon Aurora Replica, in the same or a different Availability Zone, when failing over, Amazon Aurora flips the canonical name record (CNAME) for your DB Instance to point at the healthy replica, which is in turn is promoted to become the new primary. Start-to-finish, failover typically completes within a minute.
If you do not have an Amazon Aurora Replica (i.e. single instance), Aurora will first attempt to create a new DB Instance in the same Availability Zone as the original instance. If unable to do so, Aurora will attempt to create a new DB Instance in a different Availability Zone. From start to finish, failover typically completes in under 15 minutes.
Your application should retry database connections in the event of connection loss.
