Also from the FAQ (you are both right) ========================================================= Q: What happens during failover and how long does it take? F

Also from the FAQ (you are both right) ========================================================= Q: What happens during failover and how long does it take? Failover is automatically handled by Amazon Aurora so that your applications can resume database operations as quickly as possible without manual administrative intervention. If you have an Amazon Aurora Replica, in the same or a different Availability Zone, when failing over, Amazon Aurora flips the canonical name record (CNAME) for your DB Instance to point at the healthy replica, which is in turn is promoted to become the new primary. Start-to-finish, failover typically completes within a minute. If you do not have an Amazon Aurora Replica (i.e. single instance), Aurora will first attempt to create a new DB Instance in the same Availability Zone as the original instance. If unable to do so, Aurora will attempt to create a new DB Instance in a different Availability Zone. From start to finish, failover typically completes in under 15 minutes. Your application should retry database connections in the event of connection loss.