Amazon Aurora is a relational database service designed for the cloud, providing high performance and availability with full compatibility for MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. Aurora is preferred over traditional solutions due to its scalability, cost-effectiveness, and managed nature, which simplifies database management. It features automatic backups, serverless options, up to 15 read replicas, and multi-region replication, making it ideal for modern applications requiring reliability and global distribution. Aurora significantly reduces the total cost of ownership while delivering the performance of commercial databases at one-tenth the cost.