Aurora is one of the few real innovations in the database space recognized by SIGMOD: https://sigmod.org/sigmod-awards/citations/2019-sigmod-syste...
It provides a lot of benefits to the user and also a ton more to the service provider. Specifically you don’t overprovision storage or compute. Plus at least theoretically you can provide invite IO throughput at the storage level.
There has been a couple more iterations on the design since. Microsoft separated transaction log from storage: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/0...
Neon added an object store and branches so you can integrate backups and add a Time Machine.
PolarDB separated memory from compute - this makes serverless compute more nimble and unties memory and CPU.