Amazon Aurora

General Features

Amazon proprietary technology (NOT OPEN SOURCE)
Aurora is "AWS Cloud optimized" It claims 5x performance over MYSQL on RDS and 3x performance over Postgres on RDS
Aurora storage grows automatically
Aurora can have up to 15 read replicas
It is 20% more expensive than RDS. But it is efficient.
Automatic failover
Backup and Recovery
Isolation and security
Advanced Monitoring
Routine Maintenance
Backtrack: restore data at any point of time without using backups

Aurora High Availability and Read Scaling

6 copies of your data across 3 AZ (4/6 for writes, 3/6 for reads)
Self-healing with peer-to-peer replication.
Automated failover for master in less than 30 seconds
One Aurora instance takes writes (master)
Master + up to 15 Aurora Read Replicas serve reads
Support cross-region replication
Clients when they want to write data, establish a connection with the Writer Endpoint (points to the master) in the case of read data it points to the Reader Endpoint (points to the Load balancer for read instances)

Security (RDS and Aurora)

At-rest Encryption : When it first launched you may set encryption otherwise you need to take snapshot and you need to restore as encrypted
In-flight Encryption : TLS ready by default
IAM Authentication : IAM roles to connect databases
Security Groups : Control network access to RDS and Aurora
No SSH available except RDS Custom