When companies move their infrastructure from on-premise data centers to the clouds — AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, etc., it has to decide whether to use a database service or to set up the database on virtual machines. Specifically to AWS, one of the three options — EC2, RDS and Aurora have to be chosen based on the requirements of the specific company.
If you are interested in Google Cloud, please check my other comparison article of CloudSQL and Compute Engine (VMs).
A detailed comparison of EC2, RDS and Aurora for db solutions will be described first, and the general suggestions for making the choice between these three will be proposed in the end.
The background is that we need a database server with 16 CPU cores,128 GB memory and 2TB database size and a proper failover solution. The table below lists the comparison results of EC2, RDS and Aurora in 7 aspects based on our database requirements.
There are several advantages of using EC2 instances. First of all, EC2 instances are more cost-effective. From the row ‘Pricing per instance’ in the table, the per-instance cost of RDS is twice as the EC2 instances, and the cost of Aurora is approximately 23% more than RDS. From the row ‘Failover’, if we want to set up the failover and a read…