Netflix’s Aurora Leap: How a Cloud-Native Shift Delivered 75% Faster Performance and 28% Lower Costs

Netflix has completed a large-scale migration of its relational database infrastructure to Amazon Aurora, moving away from self-managed databases on Amazon EC2 to a cloud-native, managed service. The transition is expected to deliver 75% faster data access while cutting operating costs by 28%, according to InfoQ. Prior to the migration, Netflix’s Online Data Storage team ran a self-managed, distributed PostgreSQL setup on EC2, which offered control but added complexity and burden.

After the shift to Aurora with PostgreSQL compatibility, metrics show notable latency improvements—for example, Spinnaker latency dropped 50% (from 67.57 ms to 41.70 ms) and the Policy Engine at critical endpoints fell from 26.72 ms to 6.51 ms.

Netflix emphasises Aurora’s architecture, which decouples compute from storage and uses a log-based write mechanism, enabling read replicas to be promoted to writers within 100 milliseconds and illustrating a broader enterprise trend toward managed services and reduced licensing costs.