Hell, the amount of work that an OLD 1U can do is absurd. I have 3x Dell R620s (circa-2012), and when equipped with NVMe drives, they match the newest RDS instances, and blow Aurora out of the water.

I’ve tested this repeatedly, at multiple companies, with Postgres and MySQL. Everyone thinks Aurora must be faster because AWS is pushing it so hard; in fact, it’s quite slow. Hard to get around physics. My drives are mounted via Ceph over Infiniband, and have latency measured in microseconds. Aurora (and RDS for that matter) has to traverse much longer physical distances to talk to its drives.