The AWS pages are very heavy on marketing and light on system characteristics. It would be pretty nice to know if the characteristics of Aurora are different than RDS; for example, RDS table size and index rebuilding were a big problem for a client, and I suspect that Aurora would do better, but have no reason to believe it.
We've made a number of improvements relative to MySQL, for example with large numbers of tables and the results set cache. There are some improvements on large tables and schema changes, but quite a bit more to be done in those areas. You can contact our PM team at aurora[dash]pm[at]amazon[dot]com to give us the issues that matter most. Feedback is how we prioritize!
