Amazon Aurora Snapshot Restore Really Slow

Question

Is there a way to speed up the restoring of Amazon Aurora cluster snapshots?

Our database is 20 megabytes right now, yet doing a snapshot restore takes an hour.

Answer 1

Classic RDS Mysql would take a snapshot of your EBS volume, and hence taking the snapshot would take more time, but restoring would be pretty fast. (You may need to warm up the new instance by issuing queries though).

As far as I know, Aurora uses a distributed store in the backend, which would just record metadata during a snapshot API call, there by making it really fast. However, restoring from a snapshot might end up taking some time as they would need to create a new volume based on the info they have on the snapshot. I've seen fast restores as well in my experiments.

If you need really snappy restores (to the same cluster), consider using Backtrack. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-backtrack-turn-back-time/

P.S. This is based on my experiments with these services, and general research about these services.