This document provides an overview of Amazon Aurora and discusses its performance advantages over traditional databases. Aurora delivers the performance and availability of commercial databases at 1/10th the cost by leveraging simple open source architecture. The document describes how Aurora achieves high performance through its distributed, asynchronous architecture and integration with other AWS services. It also discusses how Aurora provides high availability through its quorum-based storage system and ability to handle failures without stopping writes or restarting the database. Finally, the document shares benchmark results and customer use cases that demonstrate Aurora's ability to scale to large workloads and datasets at significantly lower costs than alternative solutions.