Amazon Aurora is an AWS RDS database engine with two editions: MySQL and PostgeSQL.
Amazon often headlines both editions without distinction as "Aurora" (example), but there are significant differences between the two. This is a convenient reference to understand their features and avoid confusion over the generic "Aurora" label.
Dates of feature support are given to provide a sense of priority and timing.
| MySQL | PostgreSQL | |
|---|---|---|
| General availability | 2015-07-27 | 2017-10-24 |
| Zero-downtime RDS migration | 2015-07-27 | 2018-01-22 |
| Encryption at rest | 2015-12-07 | 2017-10-24 |
| Cross-region replication | 2016-06-01 | No |
| Reader endpoint | 2016-09-08 | 2017-10-24 |
| Asynchronous lambda procedures | 2016-10-18 | No |
| T2/T3 instances (burstable instances) | 2016-11-23 | No |
| IAM database authentication | 2017-04-24 | 2018-11-08 |
| S3 export | 2017-06-01 | No |
| Fast cloning | 2017-08-30 | 2018-04-10 |
| Auto scaling replicas | 2017-11-17 | 2018-08-16 |
| Synchronous lambda procedures | 2017-12-11 | No |
| Backtrack (fast in-place restore) | 2018-05-10 | No |
| Publish logs to CloudWatch | 2018-05-23 | 2019-08-09 |
| Performance insights (advanced database monitoring) | 2018-08-06 | 2018-07-18 |
| Serverless (automatic startup/shutdown) | 2018-08-09 | 2019-07-09 |
| Parallel query (storage-level query processing) | 2018-09-28 | No |
| Custom endpoints | 2018-11-22 | 2018-11-22 |
| Global database (fast cross-region replication) | 2018-11-27 | No |
| Query Plan Management (control query plan changes) | No | 2018-12-19 |
| Performance insights counter metrics | 2019-02-20 | 2018-12-17 |
| Replication with native databases | Yes | 2019-03-28 |
| Import S3 backups (e.g. fast RDS migration) | 2019-04-18 | No |
| Data API (JSON API) | 2019-05-30 | 2019-09-24 |
| Multi-Master | 2019-08-08 | No |
| Storage tags | 2019-10-23 | 2019-10-23 |
| Comprehend/SageMaker integration | 2019-11-26 | No |
| Redshift federated queries | No | 2019-12-03 |
| Instance families | t2, t3, r3, r4, r5 | t31, r4, r5 |
| Maximum storage | 64 TB | 64 TB |
| Continuous incremental backups | 1-35 days | 1-35 days |
| Minimum cost (on-demand) | $30/month | $59/month |
| Version upgrade path | Supported | Supported for minor versions only2 |
1. Only t3.medium.
2. Documention claims support, but AWS Support has confirmed that is not the case: "The documentation might be confusing in the description, unfortunately the upgrade of an existing Aurora PostgreSQL instance version 9.6.x to version 10.x, is still not supported."
Please contribute a PR to fix incomplete/inaccurate information.