Amazon Aurora Is very expensive !

A few month ago, we migrated one of our DB built on top of ec2 m3.xlarge and GP2 disk in us-west-1 to Aurora in us-west-2 region.

Some Observation:

• Aurora only available in some region with at least 3 az, in us-west-1 north California, us-west-1a is already full, so we can not use it in this region

• IP traffic from us-west-1 and us-west-2 go through specific tunnel, latenct and bandwidth are guarantee

• But Aurora is expensive, and can not save you 90% of cost, stated in aws login screen. Specifically, Aurora charge you by every IO request you have made, this is horrible.

We have approx 50GB of data, QPS is about 300-500, it run smoothly on top of Dell R430 with PERC H310(No RAID Buffer) Raid 0 Mode. $1000 per month is expensive for this kind of workload.