I was renting two ~$300/mo servers at Softlayer to run MySQL (Percona), with one as a backup + failover + to run my monthly browser/OS market share reports against without killing the website by overloading the main server. I regularly spiked high loads that killed latency anyway this spring. I was going to have to upgrade soon anyway, so I decided to try out Aurora during the free preview period, and migrated everything over there one weekend.
Turns out a single R3.Large instance (the smallest) was more than sufficient. It's sitting at under 25% CPU and 50% memory usage right now, which means there's plenty of room to grow too. I'd say performance is as good or better than native MySQL based on that. I'm paying less now than I did for the two servers, and get more for it, with free multi-AZ replication, nightly snapshots, and the ability to spin up a live replica in just a few minutes to run backups/large reports against, then shut down and only pay for the hour.
How long does it typically take for the live replica to come online?