Amazon Web Services Rolls Out Amazon Aurora Serverless

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has rolled out its serverless version of Amazon Aurora “Amazon Auora Serverless”.

Aurora Serverless is another option that can be deployed and run on demand and can be auto-scaled and configured for Auora.

Databases within Amazon Auora Serverless can automatically start-up; shut down and scale up or down on capacity depending on the application’s needs.

What is Amazon Aurora?

Amazon Aurora is a cloud-based relational database that is compatible with both MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Aurora is fully-managed by Amazon’s Relational Database Service, thus automating administration tasks such as database setup, patching, backups and hardware provisioning.

AWS claim that their cloud-based relational database is up to “five times faster” than MySQL databases and “three times faster” than PostgreSQL databases.

In terms of storage, Amazon Aurora’ storage system can go up to 64TB per database alongside having continuous backup to Amazon S3 and replication across three availability zones.

How Does Amazon Aurora Serverless Work?

Amazon Aurora Serverless works by enabling the user to create an endpoint through the AWS Management Console where Serverless handles everything else.

If a cluster needs autoscaling up or down or resuming or pausing, Aurora can obtain that capacity through available nodes while adding them to request routers.

Customers who use Aurora Serverless will only “pay by the second” for database capacity when it’s currently in use.

Randall Hunt, Senior Technical Evangelist at AWS commented in a blog post: “The service currently has autoscaling cooldown periods of 1.5 minutes for scaling up and 5 minutes for scaling down.

“Scaling operations are transparent to the connected clients and applications since existing connections and session state are transferred to the new nodes.

“The only difference with pausing and resuming is a higher latency for the first connection, typically around 25 seconds.”

Raju Gulabani, Vice President, Databases, Analytics, and Machine Learning, AWS added:

“With the availability of Aurora Serverless, we now make it more cost effective for our customers to run intermittent or cyclical workloads that have less predictable usage patterns such as development and test workloads or applications that experience seasonal spikes, making Aurora even more attractive for every imaginable workload.”

Amazon Aurora Serverless is available in North Virginia, Ohio, Oregon and Ireland with further expansion in other regions later on in the year.