Amazon RDS vs Apache Aurora: What are the differences?

Amazon RDS: Set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud. Amazon RDS gives you access to the capabilities of a familiar MySQL, Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server database engine. This means that the code, applications, and tools you already use today with your existing databases can be used with Amazon RDS. Amazon RDS automatically patches the database software and backs up your database, storing the backups for a user-defined retention period and enabling point-in-time recovery. You benefit from the flexibility of being able to scale the compute resources or storage capacity associated with your Database Instance (DB Instance) via a single API call; Apache Aurora: An Apcahe Mesos framework for scheduling jobs, originally developed by Twitter. Apache Aurora is a service scheduler that runs on top of Mesos, enabling you to run long-running services that take advantage of Mesos' scalability, fault-tolerance, and resource isolation.

Amazon RDS and Apache Aurora are primarily classified as "SQL Database as a Service" and "Cluster Management" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Amazon RDS are:

• Pre-configured Parameters
• Monitoring and Metrics
• Automatic Software Patching

On the other hand, Apache Aurora provides the following key features:

• Deployment and scheduling of jobs
• The abstraction a “job” to bundle and manage Mesos tasks
• A rich DSL to define services

Apache Aurora is an open source tool with 616 GitHub stars and 231 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Apache Aurora's open source repository on GitHub.

Airbnb, Netflix, and Coursera are some of the popular companies that use Amazon RDS, whereas Apache Aurora is used by Twitter, Oscar Health, and Medallia. Amazon RDS has a broader approval, being mentioned in 1437 company stacks & 526 developers stacks; compared to Apache Aurora, which is listed in 6 company stacks and 3 developer stacks.