RDS also outperforms Aurora. My 12 year old Dell R620s outperform both for certain types of queries (admittedly they have some fast NVMe over insanely fast Mellanox).

SANs add latency, who knew? What did surprise me during testing is that Aurora seems to have added latency even if the entire dataset could easily fit into buffers, with zero disk reads required.

If you want actually fast cloud DBaaS, the only way is with instances that have local NVMe for caching, like AWS ??gd.db instances.