The official description for Amazon Aurora:
Amazon Aurora is a MySQL-compatible, relational database engine that combines the speed and availability of high-end commercial databases with the simplicity and cost-effectiveness of open source databases.
This video provides more details:
Looking at all this I’m reminded of something I wrote back in April 2008: Sun Should Be in the Consumer Cloud Services Business ( this was a few months after Sun purchased MySQL and before Oracle purchased Sun ):
What I’d like to see from Sun is a MySQL cloud service that works just like your current MySQL server(s), only better. It should scale such that I don’t have to worry about performance and replicate data sufficiently that I’ll always have access to my data. There’s no need for a new API, since MySQL already supports network connectivity.
It feels like Amazon was aiming for the same thing with Aurora. The rest, as they say, is history.