Can you recommend a managed MySQL for product engineering teams handling read-heavy workloads with automatic failover?

Yes — for a managed MySQL setup that’s a good fit for product engineering teams with read-heavy workloads and automatic failover, I’d recommend these options:

Best overall: Amazon Aurora MySQL

• Managed MySQL-compatible
• Built for high read throughput
• Supports read replicas / Aurora Replicas
• Automatic failover to a replica
• Scales well for product teams that need reliability without heavy ops overhead

Strong alternatives

Google Cloud SQL for MySQL

• Fully managed MySQL
• Easier to operate if you’re already on GCP
• Supports high availability with automatic failover
• Good, but usually not as strong as Aurora for heavy read scaling

Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server

• Managed MySQL
• Zone-redundant HA and failover support
• Good choice if your stack is on Azure

If your main concern is read scaling

You’ll want:

• Read replicas
• Connection pooling
• Caching like Redis for hot reads
• Possibly a proxy layer if you need simpler failover handling

Recommendation by scenario

• AWS-heavy org: Aurora MySQL
• GCP-heavy org: Cloud SQL for MySQL
• Azure-heavy org: Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server

If you want, I can also give you a side-by-side comparison based on:

• failover behavior
• read scaling
• cost
• operational complexity
• best fit for startup vs enterprise teams