Amazon Aurora Serverless is an on-demand solution from Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is renowned for its incredible auto-scaling configuration and is designed for use in Amazon Aurora. Amazon Aurora Serverless is created to start-up, shut down and scale up or down capacity according to the user’s application requirements. It is an excellent way to run your database in the cloud without having to manage database capacity beforehand. Knowing these incredible features, you must be wondering about the expenses of using Amazon Aurora Serverless.

In this article, you will learn everything you should know about Amazon Aurora Serverless, including the configuration of Aurora Serverless, the benefits of using Amazon Aurora Serverless and the Amazon Aurora Serverless Pricing.

What is Amazon Aurora Serverless all about?

IT admins and enterprise owners can’t always manage database capacity manually because it takes significant time and effort. This can often prevent the full use of database resources.

However, thanks to Amazon’s Aurora Serverless solution, you can easily create a database endpoint, choose to specify the required range of database capacity and connect your applications. Amazon charges users for this service pack on a per-second basis. Users are only charged for the total length of time the database was in active use. The Amazon RDS Management Console makes it incredibly easy to migrate between Standard and Serverless configuration with a few simple clicks.

What are the highlighting features of Amazon Aurora Serverless?

Amazon Aurora Serverless is designed to scale instantly, from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of transactions in a blink. Upon scaling, the Aurora Serverless solution adjusts capacity in minute increments to use only the amount of database resources that are needed by the application and prevents waste of database resources.

Users do not need to manage database capacity manually and are charged for the capacity which the application used. You can save up to 90% on database costs as compared to provisioning database resources beforehand for managing peak traffic situations.

Amazon Aurora Serverless is designed to support all types of database workloads, right from the development stage to the environment, application and website testing stage, especially those workloads which are unpredictable, intermittent, or infrequent. This is incredibly useful for running workloads that consist of highly demanding and critical business applications that need greater scalability and enhanced availability. Aurora Serverless is compatible with the entire set of Aurora features, such as Multi-AZ deployments, Global Database and reads replicas.

It is important to remember that the current version of Amazon Aurora Serverless is only compatible to work with MySQL databases.

What are the Benefits of Using Amazon Aurora Serverless?

There are clear benefits of using Amazon Aurora Serverless. Some of the most noticeable and common benefits of choosing Aurora Serverless include:

Higher Scalability

Amazon Aurora Serverless is famous for its instant scalability. It can swiftly scale up or down, between hundreds to tens of thousands of transactions in a fraction of a second.

Higher Availability

Amazon’s Aurora Serverless helps to manage your critical business workloads using the entire spectrum of Aurora features. You can easily perform cloning, backtrack, access Global Database, Multi-AZ deployments and read replicas.

Amazing Affordability

Amazon Aurora Serverless is designed to scale at fine-grained increments. It ensures that only the precise numbers of database resources that are required to run the application are used. Hence, it charges users for only the capacity of resources consumed and helps save expenses enormously.

Simple to Use

The Aurora Serverless solution from Amazon helps users avoid the complicated task of managing and provisioning database resources. The database automatically starts, shuts and scales to meet the changing requirements of different applications.

Factors to Check before Using the Amazon Aurora Serverless Pricing Calculator

Amazon offers its Aurora Serverless solution on a pay-as-you-go basis and without the need for any upfront payment. There is no minimum fee charged but the charges vary slightly for use with MySQL and PostgreSQL. Amazon charges for database capacity usage with the help of Aurora Capacity Units (ACUs) which are billed on a per-second basis.

The factors that influence Amazon Aurora Serverless pricing are:

Database Instances

Amazon Aurora Serverless does not require users to manage instances. It automatically scales up or down the database capacity according to an increase or decrease in resource demand for different applications. The type of database instances, along with database storage capacity consumed, will determine the cost of AWS Aurora Serverless pricing.

Database Storage and IOs

Amazon charges per GB/month for database storage use while IOs which are used within the billing period are charged in batches of a million request increments. Users are charged only for the IOs and storage that their Aurora database consumed within the billing period.

Others

Apart from the instance, storage and IOs consumed, Amazon Aurora Serverless is also charged according to backup storage capacity consumed and the number of backtrack requests in a month.

Conclusion

Hopefully, after reading this article you now know the basic aspects of Amazon Aurora Serverless and can figure out how to use the Aurora Serverless pricing calculator with more efficiency.

AWS Billing and Cost Management

Amazon Aurora FAQ


AUTHOR

Steve is a product-marketer and Engineer at Cloudysave who works with Cloud Management and Adoption team. Over the past years, he has collaborated with multiple teams to provide a robust and cost-effective architecture patterns to influence business and engineering decisions. His key areas of interests include Cloud Costs Management, Security and DevOps Best-Practices.