Multi-region: Global Database for disaster recovery (<1s replication, single write region)
Free Tier: new-account AWS Free Tier — $100 in credits at sign-up plus up to $100 more ($200 total), usable across eligible services including Aurora for up to 12 months. Free plan gives Aurora PostgreSQL serverless up to 4 ACUs and 1 GiB storage per cluster; upgrade to Paid for up to 256 ACUs / 256 TiB (per aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/pricing)
Min cost: ~$0 with auto-pause (storage only); ~$45/month always-on at 0.5 ACU (compute only; storage billed separately)
Time to first query: ~90-120 seconds (Express Configuration) or 10-15 min (standard VPC setup)
Key features: Express Configuration, I/O-Optimized, Managed Upgrades with Blue/Green Deployments, AWS Organizations for upgrade rollout policy, PostgreSQL extensions including pgvector, dynamic data masking (pg_columnmask), PostGIS, Zero ETL integrations to Redshift and Opensearch, up to 5x write and 3x read throughput vs RDS, faster failover (<30s vs 60-120s for RDS Multi-AZ)
Limitations: Single write region, slightly higher cost than RDS for equivalent instance size, proprietary storage layer (not portable to community PostgreSQL without application-level export)
Best for: Workloads requiring full PostgreSQL, pgvector/AI embeddings, migrations from PostgreSQL, refactors from Oracle/SQL Server
Not for: Users who just need simple SQL without PG-specific features (DSQL is simpler)