As a disclaimer, I generally dislike most managed offerings of anything, because I don’t think you get nearly the value out of them for the price hike (and performance drop). For DBs especially, I don’t see the value, but I’m also a DBRE with extensive Linux experience, so the maintenance side doesn’t bother me.

For Aurora in general, here’s a short list:

* Since the storage is separated, and farther than even EBS, latency is worse. Local, on-hardware NVMe is blindingly fast, enough that you can often forget that it isn’t RAM.

* I’ve yet to see Aurora perform better; MySQL or Postgres variants. My 13 year old Dell R620s literally outperform them; I’ve tested it.

* The claimed benefit of being able to take a DB up to 128 TiB is a. an artificial limit that they’ve made worse by denying the same to RDS b. difficult to reach in practice, because of a bunch of gotchas like fixed-size temporary storage, which can make it impossible to do online DDL of large tables.

* For the MySQL variant, they removed the change buffer entirely (since storage is distributed, it was necessary for their design), which dramatically slows down writes to tables with secondary indices.

* It’s not open-source. I can and have pored through Postgres and MySQL source code, built debug builds, etc. to figure out why something was happening.