"Amazon Aurora delivers significant increases over MySQL performance by tightly integrating the database engine with an SSD-based virtualized storage layer purpose-built for database workloads, reducing writes to the storage system, minimizing lock contention and eliminating delays created by database process threads. Our tests with SysBench show that Amazon Aurora delivers over 500,000 SELECTs/sec and 100,000 updates/sec, five times higher than MySQL running the same benchmark on the same hardware."
I'd love to see more details (active benchmarking). At the very least, what is the CPU and disk utilization during the benchmark? It'll shed some light on how this was done: a 5x improvement in cycles per query? Or better caching?
People will benchmark this themselves ASAP. If you do, try to include some basic system metrics. The output of "vmstat 10", "iostat -x 10", and some "pidstat -t 1" would be a great start. This may only be possible for the MySQL benchmark, if Aurora is only visible via an API, and the database system can't be accessed directly (?).
To get the most comparable hardware setup for the comparison, I think you would want to run both Aurora and MySQL via RDS. RDS does not give you access to the underling EC2 instance, just to metrics via Cloudwatch.
