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> One thing that surprised us that our TAM says that on a 1 AZ write-heavy workload normal MySQL would have higher performance as Aurora synchronously write to storage servers in other AZs

What is surprising about a multi-AZ database having higher latency than one that runs in only one AZ?

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From what I can tell, they provisioned their DB instance(s) in a single AZ, but weren't aware that Aurora automatically provisions its own storage and always uses multiple AZs. We touch on the separation of compute and storage in the post.

I think the surprise is that it's not possible to have a truly "single AZ" Aurora database, even though you might have thought you provisioned your DB instances that way.

I see. I haven’t used Aurora, but have had experience running write heavy workloads on RDS. EBS failures would regularly (like monthly) cause our write latency to spike up 3-5x. If Aurora’s storage layer architecture is more resilient to those types of problems, that seems like a huge win.

Should not be a surprise if you are using Aurora hopefully. Papers on the topic are very clear on how they scale the storage.

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