Ten years ago, we announced the general availability of Amazon Aurora, a database that combined the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.

As Jeff described it in its launch blog post: “With storage replicated both within and across three Availability Zones, along with an update model driven by quorum writes, Amazon Aurora is designed to deliver high performance and 99.99% availability while easily and efficiently scaling to up to 64 TiB of storage.”

When we started developing Aurora over a decade ago, we made a fundamental architectural decision that would change the database landscape forever: we decoupled storage from compute. This novel approach enabled Aurora to deliver the performance and availability of commercial databases at one-tenth the cost.

This is one of the reasons why hundreds of thousands of AWS customers choose Aurora as their relational database.

Today, I’m excited to invite you to join us for a livestream event on August 21, 2025, to celebrate a decade of Aurora database innovation.

A brief look back at the past
Throughout the evolution of Aurora, we’ve focused on four core innovation themes: security as our top priority, scalability to meet growing workloads, predictable pricing for better cost management, and multi-Region capabilities for global applications. Let me walk you through some key milestones in the Aurora journey.

We previewed Aurora at re:Invent 2014, and made it generally available in July 2015. At launch, we presented Aurora as “a new cost-effective MySQL-compatible database engine.”

In June 2016, we introduced reader endpoints and cross-Region read replicas, followed by AWS Lambda integration and the ability to load tables directly from Amazon S3 in October. We added database cloning and export to Amazon S3 capabilities in June 2017 and full compatibility with PostgreSQL in October that year.

The journey continued with the serverless preview in November 2017, which became generally available in August 2018. Global Database launched in November 2018 for cross-Region disaster recovery. We introduced blue/green deployments to simplify database updates, and optimized read instances to improve query performance.

In 2023, we added vector capabilities with pgvector for similarity search for Aurora PostgreSQL, and Aurora I/O-Optimized to provide predictable pricing with up to 40 percent cost savings for I/O-intensive applications. We launched Aurora zero-ETL integration with Amazon Redshift which enables near real-time analytics and ML using Amazon Redshift on petabytes of transactional data from Aurora by removing the need for you to build and maintain complex data pipelines that perform extract, transform, and load (ETL) operations. This year we added Aurora MySQL zero-ETL integration with Amazon Sagemaker, enabling near real-time access of your data in the lakehouse architecture of SageMaker to run a broad range of analytics.

In 2024, we made it as effortless as just one click to select Aurora PostgreSQL as a vector store for Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases and launched Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless Database, a serverless horizontal scaling (sharding) capability.

To simplify scaling for customers, we also increased the maximum storage to 128 TiB in September 2020, allowing many applications to operate within a single instance. Last month, we’ve further simplified scaling by doubling the maximum storage to 256 TiB, with no upfront provisioning required and pay-as-you-go pricing based on actual storage used. This enables even more customers to run their growing workloads without the complexity of managing multiple instances while maintaining cost efficiency.

Most recently, at re:Invent 2024, we announced Amazon Aurora DSQL, which became generally available in May 2025. Aurora DSQL represents our latest innovation in distributed SQL databases, offering active-active high availability and multi-Region strong consistency. It’s the fastest serverless distributed SQL database for always available applications, effortlessly scaling to meet any workload demand with zero infrastructure management.

Aurora DSQL builds on our original architectural principles of separation of storage and compute, taking them further with independent scaling of reads, writes, compute, and storage. It provides 99.99% single-Region and 99.999% multi-Region availability, with strong consistency across all Regional endpoints.

And in June, we launched Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for Aurora, so you can integrate your AI agents with your data sources and services.

Let’s celebrate 10 years of innovation
By attending the August 21 livestream event, you’ll hear from Aurora technical leaders and founders, including Swami Sivasubramanian, Ganapathy (G2) Krishnamoorthy, Yan Leshinsky, Grant McAlister, and Raman Mittal. You’ll learn directly from the architects who pioneered the separation of compute and storage in cloud databases, with technical insights into Aurora architecture and scaling capabilities. You’ll also get a glimpse into the future of database technology as Aurora engineers share their vision and discuss the complex challenges they’re working to solve on behalf of customers.

The event also offers practical demonstrations that show you how to implement key features. You’ll see how to build AI-powered applications using pgvector, understand cost optimization with the new Aurora DSQL pricing model, and learn how to achieve multi-Region strong consistency for global applications.

The interactive format includes Q&A opportunities with Aurora experts, so you’ll be able to get your specific technical questions answered. You can also receive AWS credits to test new Aurora capabilities.

If you’re interested in agentic AI, you’ll particularly benefit from the sessions on MCP servers, Strands Agents, and how to integrate Strands Agents with Aurora DSQL, which demonstrate how to safely integrate AI capabilities with your Aurora databases while maintaining control over database access.

Whether you’re running mission-critical workloads or building new applications, these sessions will help you understand how to use the latest Aurora features.

Register today to secure your spot and be part of this celebration of database innovation.

To the next decade of Aurora innovation!

— seb