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For an on-prem MySQL estate (~1.1 TB, 340 tables), DMS full load + CDC into Aurora MySQL cut planned downtime from 6h → 18 min — LOB misconfiguration added 11 hours of rework before cutover.
For a retailer DW exit (~42 TB logical, 18 nightly Glue jobs), Aurora→Redshift zero-ETL retired 11 jobs and cut dashboard freshness from 6h → ~15 min — concurrency scaling on zero-ETL (March 2026) absorbed Monday open spikes.
Aurora bills instance hours plus storage plus I/O — or storage at a 125% premium with I/O bundled (I/O-Optimized). Serverless v2 at $0.12 per ACU-hour wins on variable workloads, loses on steady traffic above 4 ACU. Global Database doubles the price per secondary region plus replicated-write fees. Backtrack adds per-change-record cost most teams never factor in.
July 2026 field note: Aurora failover windows still force app timeouts above tens of seconds; DynamoDB hot partitions and short transactions remain the scaling levers — with a partition-math worksheet you can reproduce.