RDS also outperforms Aurora. My 12 year old Dell R620s outperform both for certain types of queries (admittedly they have some fast NVMe over insanely fast Mellanox).
SANs add latency, who knew? What did surprise me during testing is that Aurora seems to have added latency even if the entire dataset could easily fit into buffers, with zero disk reads required.
If you want actually fast cloud DBaaS, the only way is with instances that have local NVMe for caching, like AWS ??gd.db instances.
Mine thinks we’re going to be able to shift a massive, resource-hungry PG BDR mesh onto Aurora. I don’t buy it, purely from a performance capability standpoint. The only reason the shit queries we have run at all is through sheer performance.
$60,000 per year in-house vs $1,200,000 per year aurora. No brainer really.